Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access | Hacker News Reader

Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

bbc.com

561 pointsdjoldman678 comments

I feel like this is a response to the exponential popularity of sites like r/exmormon among younger generations. For example, look at these exceptions. It seems like organic, unapproved discussion between users is what the bill is trying to stifle:

> (D) news, sports, entertainment, or other content that is preselected by the provider and not user generated, ... (Q) to permit comments on a digital news website, if the news content is posted only by the provider of the digital news website,

If this law was in place when I was growing up, my life would probably look very different, and not for the better. My interests, hobbies, profession, my sense of humor etc, all have deep roots in the online communities I participated as a kid. More importantly, those communities gave me a sense of hope when I didn't have much.

Parental approval does nothing to stop the real harm that social media can cause, nor does this bill provide incentives for platforms to improve past that potential for harm. It's about ensuring that kids aren't exposed to their peers, or ideas, that might disagree with what their parents believe.

+1. As an Indian kid growing up in a very conservative family/neighborhood I can attest that what I have learned and have helped me in becoming successful was all through my peers and books (mostly fiction). If I had no access to those and had purely followed what my parents prescribed, I would have been a very different individual and most likely, would not have pursued computer science. More than anything, succees or otherwise, peer learning and learning on my own was and still continues to be the emblem of freedom.

There surely is a downside to this, that this self learning can veer you off in a sub optimal direction of laziness, procrastination, lost concentration etc, as experienced in today's social media. However, it's better to bet the odds on freedom of individuals than on oversight.

Gay guy here.

I have always said that these sort of laws designed to protect children will do precisely the opposite. An LGBTQ child is effectively forcibly outed by this law, potentially before they've come to terms with their sexuality / gender themselves.

Whilst I don't doubt social media causes a lot of harm on children growing up, giving parents full access to your messages is not the solution. In my opinion, based off a scale of a child's age and maturity, children are entitled to some privacy. Clearly a 4 year old shouldn't be left alone with unfettered access to the Internet, but equally a 16 year old shouldn't have to feel like their parents are watching everything they do or say. Both can cause long term psychological harm to a child.

They are not designed to protect kids. There is always campaign designed to elicit fear and contempt and then they take controlling laws.

Talking about it as if safety was a goal instead of control is just falling into their lie.

It's never about the kids protection/rights. Kids don't vote, parents do. Nearly every proposed law marketed as protecting kids is actually about increasing parent or state control over kids.

It's always important to remember that the tools that enable freedom, like voting, can be used against freedom, if enough of the population does not value it.

Yes. This should be seen in the context of the huge set of anti-trans laws and the Florida book banning. There is going to be another attempt at making it illegal for kids to hear about non-straight people at all. And outing kids to their parents, even at risk of violence, is a part of that.

The "land of free speech" always has a big "not you" exemption that can be wielded against people who aren't WASPy enough.

Edit: see the absolutely huge number of people on HN downthread cheering this on because they hate Facebook. Strange world.

> The "land of free speech" always has a big "not you" exemption that can be wielded against people who aren't WASPy enough

WASPs are the ones pushing pornographic books in schools. Florida is one of the most diverse states in the country.

Neither of those things are true? The books being banned are not pornographic?

“WASP” has the specific connotation of northeastern white people of longstanding American lineage. (The term typically excludes southern and Appalachian whites that technically also are Anglo Saxon and Protestant.) Those people are the vanguard of social liberalism today, in states like Massachusetts and Connecticut.

In Florida, meanwhile, non-Hispanic whites are just 51% of the population (versus 65-70% in Massachusetts and Connecticut). And the white people who are there aren’t really “WASPs” in the typical sense of the word. DeSantis, of course, isn’t a WASP at all. He’s a Catholic. American social conservatism is primarily a coalition of southern whites, “ethnic whites” (German, Italian, and Irish), and Hispanics—none of whom were traditionally considered “WASPs.”

The books are absolutely pornographic: https://www.ibtimes.sg/texas-school-sparks-outrage-after-mom.... They contain graphic depictions of underage people engaged in sex acts.

The graphic depiction of underage people engaged in sex acts is against federal law and most likely Texas law as well. It is baffling to me how the media depicts this as "anti trans" or "anti lgbt" book banning while managing to never mention the specifics of the books.

I'm about as liberal as they come on social issues. But I don't think these books are appropriate in an elementary or middle school library.

> It is baffling to me how the media depicts this as "anti trans" or "anti lgbt" book banning while managing to never mention the specifics of the books.

It’s because a lot of people are using a small number of sexual minorities as a pretext for encouraging everyone’s kids to explore their sexuality.

Are all the books being banned pornographic? Is this a way for people to get some books that maybe should be banned but then go after books where gays and trans people are shown in a positive light?

It’s specifically a reaction to the American Library Association giving “Gender Queer” one of its top awards for the age 12-18 category. It revealed that the librarians teaching your kids are a lot more progressive about kids exploring their sexuality than even Obama-voting parents who support equal civil rights but still hold traditional beliefs about sex being shameful and something children should be protected from. That’s why republicans were able to leverage the issue in places like Florida and Virginia—places that often swing blue due to large Hispanic and Asian populations, who also happen to be pretty conservative on sexual issues.

" It revealed that the librarians teaching your kids are a lot more progressive about kids exploring their sexuality than even Obama-voting parents w"

Source? I ask because I didn't know librarians teach kids

Do you have a kid (or remember being one)? We had scheduled trips to the library and librarians were actively involved in recommending books, both to individuals and in terms of reading lists.

I don't but let me back up, I'm not doubting that happened. Can you provide a source for when a librarian taught sexed or something along those lines to kids?

How does banning books fix this? Was the person following the library's guidelines?

My third grader came home with a Pride sticker. To be clear, we have always told her that "sometimes kids have two mommies or two daddies and that's okay." But Pride also is wrapped up in a general positive and open attitude about sexuality that is inconsistent with my values. And frankly I don't trust my kids' liberal white teachers to talk about these subjects. There's clearly a huge disconnect between their values and my values.

I asked you for evidence of this claim

"It revealed that the librarians teaching your kids are a lot more progressive about kids exploring their sexuality "

And your proof is that your kid came home once with a pride sticker, which is about gay rights, but you have redefined to mean being open sexually and sex positive which you then say you are against.

Hating gay people is the same as hating all black people and is objectively wrong

In a country where same sex marriage is already the law of the land, and has overwhelming public support, you think that there’s not a high degree of overlap between Pride and those who have liberal attitudes on sex for other reasons? As a racial minority I can tell you that the people organizing marches on that basis typically have views that are much more radical than protecting interracial marriage.

Half the country thinks it’s okay for teenagers to have sex and another half thinks it’s immoral: https://news.gallup.com/poll/393515/americans-say-birth-cont.... You think the teachers who send third graders home with a Pride sticker aren’t overwhelmingly in the pro-teenage sex camp? You think the folks at the American library association who gave a book with explicit depictions of underage kids having sex don’t support such conduct? How to socialize kids about sex and sexuality is a multi-faceted subject that involves sensitivities that have nothing to do with gay people. You can reduce it to that if you want but you’re left scratching your head why people who overwhelmingly support same sex marriage can also support laws to more carefully curate what books public libraries make available.

"You think the teachers who send third graders home with a Pride sticker aren’t overwhelmingly in the pro-teenage sex camp"

No and prove it or shut the fuck up with bullshit "every liberal/democrat is a pedophile". Do you want to count the number of church official vs drag queens who have been arrested for child rape?

"Most child victims are abused by a parent. In 2020, a reported 483,285 perpetrators abused or neglected a child. In substantiated child abuse cases, 77% of children were victimized by a parent." Oh my god better make sure teachers don't send their kids home with pride pins, they might use it to defend against family rape.

https://www.nationalchildrensalliance.org/media-room/nationa...

Probably no one thinks it shouldn't but you are manipulating the debate by finding an example like that and ignoring books that are banned for other reasons.

Here's a list from one county https://pen.org/banned-books-florida/

I'm going to do one because I'm pretty sure I don't need to check anymore to determine that you are cherry picking.

Love to Mama: A Tribute To Mothers, by Pat Mora, Paula S. Barragán M.

"Pat Mora edited and contributed to this beautiful and celebratory collection, in which thirteen poets write with joy, humor, and love about the powerful bond between mothers, grandmothers, and children. These poets represent a wide spectrum of Latino voices, from award-winning authors to a 15-year-old new talent. They write passionately about their Puerto Rican, Cuban, Venezuelan, and Mexican American backgrounds and the undeniable influence of their mothers and grandmothers. Illustrated with exuberance by Ecuadorian artist Paula S. Barragán M.,"

They banned a valid book so you can hold it up and say what you said. In fact without these new laws I'm sure the book in question (which you didn't mention) probably wouldn't be in libraries

Nobody is "manipulating the debate." The book linked above is the most challenged book in these efforts: https://www.npr.org/2022/04/04/1090067026/efforts-to-ban-boo.... The American Library Association gave that book its Alex Award in 2020, for books for children 12-18. It's not some random book cherry-picked out of nowhere.

None of the books are "being banned." States are deciding what taxpayer-funded school libraries are making available to children. No decision has been made regarding the specific book you linked. An entire set of books approved in 2021 are being reviewed for appropriateness. Of course valid books are going to be pulled in the meantime while the government does its review. It's like a product recall--you pull the batch while you figure out how bad stuff made it through the filter.

I can’t help but notice your attempt to imply that Florida educators were somehow trying to suppress “Venezuelan, Cuban, and Puerto Rican” authors with your example. DeSantis won 68% of Cubans, and the majority of Puerto Ricans and Venezuelans. Which circles back to my point above--the librarians pushing pornographic content in schools are overwhelmingly (80%) white. It's a cultural thing--on average, white people are the ones in this country okay with adolescents having sex, and the ones who put the heaviest emphasis on kids "finding themselves."

"I can’t help but notice your attempt to imply that Florida educators were somehow trying to suppress “Venezuelan, Cuban, and Puerto Rican” authors with your example"

I don't know how you are noticing anything when I seriously just picked a random book and said nothing about their ethnicity. No where in my argument did I use that as an argument.

"None of the books are "being banned." States are deciding what taxpayer-funded school libraries are making available to children."

That's still a form of a ban. You highlighted that it's taxpayer funded, which to me means it's a violation of the first amendment. If it was a private library then that would be fine.

"Of course valid books are going to be pulled in the meantime while the government does its review. It's like a product recall--you pull the batch while you figure out how bad stuff made it through the filter."

Was there some imminent danger that they need to be pulled before reviewed? How long is a review going to take and who gets to make the decision about what is appropriate? However you're right that my example was under review. I didn't notice that the list was of books was of those both under review or banned. So let's check out another book that was banned.

"And Tango Makes Three"[1] is banned in the Lake Country School District for K-3 [2]

The stated reason is: "Administrative removal as per HB 1557 due to sexual orientation/gender identification". The book is a children's book about gay penguins. There's no sex in it and therefore it's not pornographic. Why is this justified?

The parent comment also stated "it is baffling to me how the media depicts this as "anti trans" or "anti lgbt" book banning while managing to never mention the specifics of the books."

Well there's a specific book and it's Anti-LGBT. How does this protect kids.

-----------------------------------------

Finally what about the bible? It contains descriptions of sex acts, incest, prostitution. It also is a religious book that pushes its own moral values and agenda. Why is that allowed but not books about gays?

I believe the true purpose of this law is to enforce moral values on the community and attack gays/etc by hiding their existence. The goal being to appease conservative Republicans and/or evangelicals who consistently vote Republican.

Why doesn't the 1st amendment apply here? The safety of children? How is hearing that gay people exist unsafe for kids? If you are willing to make exceptions to the 1st amendment for the safety of children that is questionable then are willing to make exceptions for one amendment why not the 2nd amendment? Guns are the leading cause of death for children between 1 and 19 in the US [3]?

[2] https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2023/02/07/heres-a-l... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Tango_Makes_Three

[3]https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/child-a...

> That's still a form of a ban. You highlighted that it's taxpayer funded, which to me means it's a violation of the first amendment. If it was a private library then that would be fine.

It doesn't violate the first amendment for the same reason it would violate the first amendment for the government to tell Barnes and Noble that it can't stock those books. When the government buys books with taxpayer money and makes them available in a taxpayer-financed public library, the government is the speaker. The first amendment permits the government to have a particular viewpoint when it acts as a speaker and provider of services.

> "And Tango Makes Three"[1] is banned in the Lake Country School District for K-3 [2] The stated reason is: "Administrative removal as per HB 1557 due to sexual orientation/gender identification". The book is a children's book about gay penguins. There's no sex in it and therefore it's not pornographic. Why is this justified?

As you admit, that is a book directed at children. Children don't think about penguins as having any sexual orientation. Sexual attraction is not a concept that's appropriate to introduce to young children.

> I believe the true purpose of this law is to enforce moral values on the community and attack gays/etc by hiding their existence. The goal being to appease conservative Republicans and/or evangelicals who consistently vote Republican.

Yes, but the moral value that's being enforced is sheltering children from being exposed to concepts of sex, sexuality, and sexual attraction. Conservative Republicans and evangelicals support that goal, but so do most people. I have literally never heard my Biden-voting Muslim-immigrant parents say the word "sex" or the Bangladeshi equivalent. And I'm married with three kids! The subject is nonetheless completely taboo. That's even though all of us support same-sex marriage in the abstract.

"Sexual attraction is not a concept that's appropriate to introduce to young children"

Valentine's day is celebrated in schools, countless movies and books talk about marriage, love, and attraction between a man and a woman. You're trying to make same sex attraction a "sex act" instead emotional.

I don't care how many people support it. The majority does not mean you can ignore the constitution.

I have literally never heard my Biden-voting Muslim-immigrant parents say the word "sex" or the Bangladeshi equivalent. And I'm married with three kids!

1.Your personal experience has no value in this conversation.

2. You having a repressed upbringng doesn't prove the opposite. I've never worn a seatbelt and have never been in a crash isn't proof that seat belts don't work.

Finally you come from a country with less rights, especially for woman and you come here and have no issue with taking the rights of another smaller group of people shows your ignorance. Not to mention the people you support along with this would remove muslims from this country if they could. You should be ashamed of yourself

You realize Bangladesh and West Bengal have extremely open prostitution and that BD is the only country in the region with legalized prostitution? Ever heard of Sonagachi in Calcutta or Kandapara near Dhaka?

It's cool as long as they also ban the Bible - incest, rape and what not.

> An LGBTQ child is effectively forcibly outed by this law, potentially before they've come to terms with their sexuality / gender themselves.

How?

Presumably the "giving parents full access to online accounts" part. It isn't difficult to imagine scenarios in which a minor is "outed" because a parent exercises their power under the law.

This has me scratching my head too

How is it that difficult to imagine how someone could be outed as gay etc if another party has the right to read through all of their messages etc lol.

In theory I agree with you and the other posters on this. But as someone with preteen kids there’s the other side of me that wants to a) protect them from all the actual shit out there, and b) perhaps more importantly encourage them to do something more constructive than mindlessly scrolling through TikTok clips that have no value whatsoever. In fact I’m far more worried about b) than a) because I know they can learn to discern a) but b) can become a true addiction. I want them to explore whatever their interests are - which may be very different than mine were at their age - what I don’t want is for them to become the equivalent of “zombie couch potatoes”. I’m also concerned about all the negative comparisons that come with “oh look how those peoples lives are so much better than mine” ; I suffered from that myself as an adult (even though I knew that what I saw on social media was not a true representation of peoples lives) and was happier after I deleted my FB account (not to mention wasting less time). Anyway I wonder how many people responding here have teenagers, because when you do, you think of this issue from a different perspective. (I’m not religious nor in Utah)

PS. Having said the above, I do not agree with a law parental consent being required until 18. I would want my kids to have acquired good habits and be able to make reasonable decisions in their own without our involvement by 14 or so.

As someone with a teen, it's tremendously difficult to navigate, and like all things related to child-rearing, it probably depends on the actual kids in question.

For our teen, the rule is that mom and dad have full access to all devices at any time. Technological limits and locks don't seem to be good options, since there are so many ways around them that I think they provide a false sense of security. Also, as teens, they're always around others that may not have locked-down access, so we simply operate under the assumption that they're seeing anything and everything. Instead, we apply some time-limiting to certain things, and make sure the phone is in it's charger in a public place at night, and generally try to make sure there are breaks from the media throughout the day.

Instead, we really try to engage with the content that they are interested in, and actually try to discuss it in a constructive manner, such as how most of what you see is stage-managed to present the best side of things, or to simply get eyeballs to build a brand and/or get advertising dollars. We never apply judgement or talk down to them in these conversations. With our child (and for many, I suspect) that's just a great way to get them to tune you out.

There's also an upside. We moved to a different town before middle school, and it was via social media that our child was able to stay in touch with old friends and to stay in touch with new friends during Covid. They're also inspired to do creative things that they've seen on TikTok. They has zero interest in cooking or baking but, for whatever reason, seeing people make stuff on TikTok sparked their interest in a way mom and dad never could.

This isn't to say that we're not worried, but at some point we have to do what we can to try to prepare them as much as possible. We were also worried the first time they walked to school alone, walked with a friend to the theater in the city for a 9:30pm movie showing, and will absolutely worry when they first get into a car at 16 and drive away. We also understand that social media is a totally different animal. It's full time, all the time, and designed to suck you in. Anything you post, even in private, will be public at some point. (This was one of our earliest topics of conversation! Unfortunately, there is a not of actual evidence to support this)

All that said, it really depends on the child, their own self-image, friends, environment, etc. If we took TikTok away, our child would be upset but would be over it quickly. Getting rid of Discord, however, would be devastating as that's how they chat with their friends. Parents should 100% be knowledgable and involved, but I think legal efforts like Utah's are doomed to fail because they'll only be successful at making adults feel like they're doing something, and there are too many ways around it. I also worry that parents will have a false confidence that restricting access will somehow solve the problem and reduce parent-child dialogue about these topics, or that kids will suffer for being digital have-nots.

Good point about separating use of social media to stay in touch with and have fun with friends vs doom scrolling

The goal was to make kids unwilling to use social media.

Social media is not the same as it was 10 years ago.

The level of which kids compare themselves to other kids took an exponential leap to a near hive mind level. Constantly comparing themselves to the instagram people with fake lives, rich kids, or extremely beautiful people is mentally damaging them.

My daughter asked me for plastic surgery, and I was dumbfounded. So I went check her internet logs, and she's been watching rich kids of instagram/tiktok/etc. So now I'm trying to figure out how to talk with her about this.

There is balance, but as her mother I don't think I'll be letting her have internet privacy until she's grown up and moved out.

May I ask how old your daughter is? It's concerning regardless of age, but if she's ~17 than I can see how this came to be, vs. if she's ~12 then I need to update my mental model of the world.

Also, did she ask about plastic surgery, or did she express interest in getting plastic surgery?

I don't mean to pry, I'm just more surprised than I (apparently) should be and would like to fix my gap in understanding.

I'm not sure why it would be too surprising.

The problem with the internet is simple: it's easy to be constantly exposed to the top 0.001% of any aspect of life.

Consider this website. How many people feel diminished in the face of the achievements of others? How many seek out their advice on how to up their game? If you could get surgery to make you better at software development, how many would do so? If grown-ass adults are subject to this sort of stuff, how do we expect children to be able to cope?

The mental health of teens and pre-teens has gotten really bad. This isn't just another "think of the children scare." Since the early 2010s the rate of self harm among girls 10-14 has ~tripled, and the rate of suicide among 10-14 year olds has doubled [1].

And there is now lots of evidence that this is because of social media and smartphones. The social lives of kids have changed drastically, in a way that does not meet their basic psychological needs [2].

I think that people's perceptions of social media are lagging behind the reality on the ground. There have always been moral panics and silly scares about whether the kids are alright, most of which were unfounded. So I think we are now reacting too slowly to the genuine health crisis caused by technology.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...

[2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

I really think it’s important to stress that it’s not all technology generally. It’s a specific thing: addictive content on mobile phones, especially when it also delivers toxic messaging (whether intentionally or not).

The really toxic thing here is the portable omnipresent virtual Skinner box.

Highlighting that specific thing will help make sure any regulation we do enact will be properly targeted. Kids learning to code or doing homework on a computer or even playing a few games is not the problem. “Social” media and hyper-addictive content is the problem. Tech that is designed to be addictive is the problem.

Addictive trash on PCs can be harmful too, but the form factor limits just how extreme and pervasive it can be.

I also think the mobile ecosystem is just culturally more oriented toward making things addictive. Mobile games, media, everything on the platform seems designed to suck people in and keep them staring. The PC ecosystem still seems to have some sense that computers should exist to help people or make them smarter, not addict them. It’s like mobile is run by the people who design slot machines.

> https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...

I don't necessarily buy the premise that the economy isn't having poor effects on teenagers' mental health just because the GFC is "over". Maybe to financial markets it is, but for people who need to work for a living, things changed since 2008 for the worse.

Teens are more likely to see their parents struggle to pay bills despite working full-time and with two incomes, they're more likely to see their parents face real threats like being unable to afford housing and the consequences that brings, they're going to see how the march of increasing costs of living affects their family in the face of stagnant wages. They also see countless examples of older people who do "everything right", yet are still laid off and can't re-enter the workforce in the same capacity as they had in the past, and are pushed out of their careers entirely.

On top of that, they're being told that they'll be relegated to a life of even worse poverty if they don't get into a good college, but even then, they aren't guaranteed a sustainable job and will have to take out a mortgage-sized loan just to attend. That loan will hang around their necks until they die even if they're only able to find a job that pays $30k a year. And if they want a job that even pays that much, they'll need a degree anyway, because those jobs have degree requirements, too.

I can understand why that would be overwhelming and depressing to teenagers.

Is that the economy, or is it the way people are socialized to think about the economy, and life in general? The suicide rate in America is four times higher than in the poor developing country I’m from.

And the economy isn't even that bad in general. I don't understand this tendency on the internet just so overly exaggerate how bad the economy is. Unemployment is near record lows right now. We have a bit of wage growth lag in the last few years thanks to everything going on, but up until then we had pretty strong wage growth.

I don't know if I'm just in a bubble because I don't live in one of the big cities with crazy housing prices? Right now it seems to be better time to be out and getting a job than any.

.... Unless you're a programmer.

> And the economy isn't even that bad in general. I don't understand this tendency on the internet just so overly exaggerate how bad the economy is. Unemployment is near record lows right now.

Unemployment doesn't tell us a whole lot. There's more people out of work today than before. Unemployment numbers don't tell you about the people whose only employment is part time or pays a fraction of what it used to pay either.

In the US evictions are on the rise, homelessness is on the rise, child poverty is on the rise, household debt is on the rise, utility service disconnections are rising, 80% of people in the US think their children will grow to be worse off than they are. None of this signals a healthy economy. The economy is making many already rich people even more money than ever before while the middle class increasingly struggles and the poor face ever rising expenses.

Outside of the tech world, this is a great time to find a job, but that doesn't mean you'll make enough money to support yourself. Programmers have it a bit rough right now, and it always hurts like hell to see your standard of living decline, but it's not that bad really. For so much of the country their standard of living starts a lot lower and it's still getting worse.

In what way is "Mom and dad can't afford rent" Not actually the economy? What is this absurd statement you are making?

Being poor is depressing, but I suspect watching your standard of living decline, your hopes and dreams destroyed, and your children forced to struggle in ways you or your parents never had to before hits harder.

All while being looked down on by your politicians who also shout at you about how it's the greatest thing ever and you should be thankful for it.

If you have socialized people into a culture where higher housing and educational costs more than offsetting the fact you make more money than your parents did at the same age causes four times as many people to kill the selves than folks in a Bangladeshi village, then I’m sorry the problem is your culture. You have created a culture where people have no resilience to a bump in the road.

The poor in your country know how to be poor.

After decades of prosperity, the USA has lost the majority of the generational knowledge and skills that poor people pass on to their children. I've spoken with people who spend almost an entire day's wage on a visit to the local laundromat.

Moreover, the poor here have very little access to mutual aid networks due to the loss of "third places" like churches. It's not uncommon to hear of poor people here having their children taken away by the state because they were just making ends meet and can't afford to pay for child care and have nobody to rely on to watch their kids after school; not even a neighbor.

I don't think this is about smartphones. This is about the online systems they interact with. We really should ban systematic user manipulation, advertising as a business and all unmoderated online spaces.

Most on-topic and/or small communities are fine. It's OK to create forum, but you need someone to step up and step in when necessary. Unmoderated FB-style exchanges and viral content with attached comment section need to go.

Well, that won't happen. Capitalists wouldn't allow it and regular people have this toxic environment internalized and normalized.

So I guess people will kill themselves. And a lot more will be permanently damaged.

It doesn't matter anyway. Soon there won't be any meaningful employment for kinds of people who fall prey to this due to ML replacing them, so this is just a drop in the ocean.

Root cause is the profit motive. Get rid of that and we can start having real discussions about what do we want.

>ban systematic user manipulation, advertising as a business and all unmoderated online spaces

One of these is not like the others.

Ban private communication because think of the children? Heard that one before. And "moderation" is "systematic user manipulation", so I guess just ban everything? "Moderation" is not some panacea, it just means some unspecified third party interfering. Moderated by whom, and by what critera? And those "FB-style exchanges" you hate are "moderated" by the FB algorithm.

This has to be one of the most boomer, gaslighting take i've ever seen. Yes, not the constant attack on LGBTQ rights, not the domestic abuses, not the shit education and academic culture, not blatant racism and neo-nazism but smartphones are what caused the mental health issues.

What has changed is the level of engagement.

The only adequate solution is to respond in kind.

That can only be done from a place of empathy, which is particularly difficult to have if you are starting now.

I think the best approach is to be clear about your intentions and motivations, and make it explicit that you are not looking for opportunity to pass judgement. Be clear about what you want to change, and ask for input.

Just to be clear, I am not a parent and I would not be so presumptuous to criticise someone's parenting skills when I have not gone through it. I wholeheartedly agree with you that the internet of 2023 is nothing like 2013 (or 2003 when I was growing up), and I don't think your reaction to the situation you described is wrong. Needless to say, parenting in this era is really, really hard and I don't envy you.

However, I want to exercise a hypothetical with you: what if you had discovered through access to her internet logs that she was a lesbian, or a trans man? How would you deal with that situation? Would you confront them, or would you pretend you didn't see it? Even if you have liberal views and are supportive*, that is a very deep and intimate piece of knowledge on your child that you hold now. Instead of them dictating the terms of their coming out, you effectively control that. That is quite a violation of trust.

Presumably your daughter knows you can see their internet logs, what if she does not feel like she isn't being her authentic self online because she knows you will find out? Even if you are supportive, discovering your sexual and/or gender identity takes time and takes having a safe space to feel comfortable to confide in someone.

This is all working under the assumption that you are comfortable with this, what about the many parents out there who are not? This becomes a weapon they can use to inflict psychological trauma on their child. Growing up as a LGBT kids is really hard for many of us, even today. Giving any more control or power to conservative parents is extremely dangerous.

You might think I'm exaggerating, or perhaps this is a niche point (it is far more likely your daughter is straight and cis-gendered) but the stakes are really high here. I came out to my parents when I was an adult, on my own terms when I moved out. I still got the 'it's just a phase' speech and all that sort of rubbish, but it was very clear to my parents that they had zero control over my life at that point. If they wanted to maintain a relationship with their son they had to change their viewpoints pretty quickly (and they did). Without hyperbole, if they had outed me when I was a child at best I would have been traumatised, at worst I would have killed myself.

I hope parents reading this really think about what I am saying here and take it seriously, because for some of you this will be something you'll have to deal with. How you do that will define everything about your relationship with your child.

* There is a whole separate discussion on what medical intervention for gender dysphoria is appropriate for children, but for the sake of this discussion I mean are you comfortable with the concept having a trans child more than specifics on medication.

Parents, for their children’s best interests, have a prerogative to control what their children are exposed to. Social media is absolutely within that domain. I’m inclined to believe anyone who disagrees with that principle is a potential predator who seeks to undermine that authority. Sexual preferences are fundamentally sexual in nature, and parents absolutely have the prerogative to gatekeep the kinds of content their children are exposed to, especially sexual content. Children cannot (and should not be) expect(ed) to have any real form of privacy while under the care and supervision and oversight of their own parents. If parents see their children on internet chats they have a right to be involved and snoop on the logs and intervene to nip bad ideas in the bud. They have a prerogative in influencing the upbringing of their children in every aspect of their lives. Children simply cannot consent to life-changing decisions such as having sex, or sexual reassignment surgeries, or taking puberty-blocking hormones (aka sterilization drugs also given to convicted pedophiles). This includes intervening when strangers on the internet are grooming their sons / daughters to convince them they are gay or trans orcc by whatever.

> strangers on the internet are grooming their sons / daughters to convince them they are gay or trans

This is just the latest bullshit moral panic du jour.

I'd rather not share specific details due to privacy concerns, but I've personally needed to rescue a loved one who was groomed by a stranger on the internet, convinced their loved ones were manipulating them and oppressing them, then kidnapped (across state lines), then encouraged to start hormone replacement therapy.

To be clear: I support trans kids and I find opportunities to support them however I can. The loved one in the case I describe is not trans. They were a minor at the time, and according to them, didn't really have a sense for how they might identify. A stranger took advantage of that, inflicted severe emotional trauma and irreversible changes, and, thankfully, will remain in prison for at least another 3 years (for this one case).

Whether it's "the latest bullshit moral panic du jour" I can't speak to. According to the FBI and state police involved in my particular experience, they've seen a sharp uptick in cases like the one my loved one experienced. I've seen my young teen age nieces nearly fall into similar traps. I only know about those close calls because my nieces have the experiences of their older family member to lean on, and know to share sketchy communications with their parents and me.

I suspect the "gay or trans" angle is indeed "bullshit moral panic" motivated by politics/fear more than anything, but the idea that young people are being manipulated and sucked into dark places is very much real.

Instead of hypothetical, let me be very very clear. It's my child not yours, not the schools, not the governments.

It's my child, that I carried for 9 months. I'll do what I think is best. I don't care about your opinion here in the slightest because at the end of the day you have no connection to my family and aren't responsible for their well being.

> you have no connection to my family and aren't responsible for their well being.

Sure, but you are, and morbia's comment here was a thoughtful call for introspection on your part when considering what that well being entails, exactly. It was not out of place.

My point was that I am and he isn't. His comment was only thoughtful on his own terms.

His terms aren't universal or acceptable because it's my family not his. He's projecting his personal experience onto my kids, which I've clearly discussed prior is not the same generationally or ever personally.

I'm not alone in this. Parent's are tired of people who have no business in our families trying to push their own visions of family, culture, politics, etc.

That's why home schooling is on the rise in both liberal and conservative circles (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/as-u-s-schools-reopen...).

> His terms aren't universal or acceptable because it's my family not his. He's projecting his personal experience onto my kids, which I've clearly discussed prior is not the same generationally or ever personally.

I am doing nothing of the sort. In fact, I haven't made any comment towards which I disagree with your actions with regards to your example. I haven't really formulated any opinions on this, and certainly not towards your family. I was wanting an open discourse using a hypothetical scenario and received a rather personal defensive retort in return.

All I believe is LGBT children have a right to be protected, sometimes that is from their own parents. Yes, that is formulated through the lens of my experiences in the same way yours are through being a mother of a child in 2023. I am not trying to push a vision of family, culture or politics, I'm trying to make parents think about this that is all. My hypothetical scenario is not so hypothetical for many families.

What you think as "pushing" is simply making people aware of the existence of another culture, idea, or political view and that's why I don't agree with you. It's similar to how people misuse "indoctrination". This whole "I'm a parent" mantra to shut down opposing views is pathetic. Being a parent doesn't make you special, doesn't mean you get more power than others, and it certainly doesn't make you right.

I also consider people like to be a danger because you think your view is 100% correct, that exposure to different opinions is wrong, and finally is that you'll use the government to push YOUR agenda, and yes that is the correct usage this time. It's already happening in Florida.[1]

You don't like what it's in public schools feel free to home school your children. You don't like what it's in the library, don't go. Unless you lock your kids away they are going to see and hear about things you disagree with and maybe you pushing so hard is going to backfire.

ON THE OTHER HAND

Keep banning books, keep calling your enemies pedophiles, and keep pushing just because you've had local success when no one was watching (i.e. Mom's for Liberty). You'll turn the right of center and moderate voters towards the Democrats and, hopefully, just like Arizona, enough states will fall and this nonsense will stop.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65071989

What if you think is best harms the child? Obviously there's limits you can think it's best to lock your kid in a basement 24/7 right?

I'm not against parental rights but also hate absolute statements like your first sentence

You may be too deep in the community to appreciate, but younger teens have had family supervision for millennia and for good reason. Their brains are not fully formed yet.

That you can think up a problematic case doesn’t mean we throw out the concept for the other 90% of kids that benefit from involved parents. Some of the rest are suicide risks even when not being harassed. They’d benefit as well.

I personally grew up in a “lord of the flies” environment and wouldn’t recommend it. Would have been nice to have some guidance, even if not perfect.

That's great, feel free to supervise your kids. You don't get to use the government to do it. Are you saying that the 1st amendment can have exceptions if a child's safety is at stake?

Oh but we do. Kids have been prohibited from entering bars and buying tobacco, by law for a long time. We generally think that's a good thing, and why it continues to be law.

Ok that's fair. It turns out that guns are the leading cause of death for kids in the US. Can we make exceptions to the 2nd admendment?

Important to keep in mind that, the Bill of Rights limits the federal government, not individuals.

That said, I'd like to see some restrictions/consequences around gun violence in homes, but unsure how that conflicts with 2A; IANAL.

Can states arrest people for what they say?

I'm going to let NY know they can ban all guns since the bill of rights doesn't apply to them

Yes, the Constitution limits state govts as well, a slight misstatement written in a hurry.

Your obtuse pedantry is not useful. Particularly when it appears you still have missed the main point of the previous statement—that the Constitution limits government, not citizens.

Also, these laws restrict children, not adults as you're suggesting. Basically this whole subthread is irrelevant. Good day.

> You may be too deep in the community to appreciate, but younger teens have had family supervision for millennia and for good reason. Their brains are not fully formed yet.

Of course, I'm not claiming otherwise. Hell, I'm not even saying that legally children should be entitled to privacy from their parents, clearly that isn't feasible or desireable in any way.

However, morally and ethically it is not black or white. It is not a case of "lord of the flies" or parental prison as a binary choice.

Honestly, I'm not even disagreeing with the original poster I replied to. I don't think they were wrong for snooping on their child's internet history. I just wanted to start an open discussion on a legitmate concern caused by snooping which many families go through. It is something that heterosexual parents often do not consider or appreciate because it was not part of their experiences when they grew up. To use your terms, they are "too deep in their community" to appreciate it.

Sure. The internet has become even more dangerous as time goes by however, so I don't feel like it should be the first or only solution to the real problem cases you mention.

The science is that people’s brains aren’t fully developed until age 25. What they have access to before that time should be carefully curated by adults.

But peoples brains also deteriorate with time.

I believe only men(women have a smaller brain size and never achieve maturity) between the ages 25 and 40 should pick books for everyone else.

Think of the gay children.

It is well known that more teens commit suicide in insular religious communities.

It's not social media it is people driving other people to despair. Ofcourse you can't really fix that.

Source? That isn't true.

I disagree. I don't think full access to messages is always necessary, but it can be in some circumstances and it should be up to the parent to decide how responsible their child is online and grant privacy accordingly.

A 16 year old is still going through tons of life changing events. Everyone needs help charting a course through life, especially at that age. Who better than a loving parent to guide them?

Parents should be aware of what their kids are doing online. More and more of "life" is online. More and more harm is impacting kids online. A parent whos entirely unaware of what their child is doing online is simply failing to be a parent.

> Who better than a loving parent to guide them?

Many of us didn't have loving parents. We had parents who would weaponize any detail they learned about us in order to hurt us.

I used the internet to get away from my parents when I physically couldn't.

A constructive solution to that is to call CPS or even run away. Getting hooked on tiktok as you would a drug is not.

I don’t believe this bill blocks iMessage for example.

So a child getting addicted to Tiktok is worse than them running away or calling CPS, which could lead to their removal?

Hard to judge "what is worse" without more information. What I do know is that tiktok is not a solution.

CPS gets a bad wrap, often justifiably. But some in-fact-horrible parents do deserve to have their kids taken away to safety.

> If this law was in place when I was growing up, my life would probably look very different, and not for the better. My interests, hobbies, profession, my sense of humor etc, all have deep roots in the online communities I participated as a kid. More importantly, those communities gave me a sense of hope when I didn't have much.

There's not enough details but I take it online communities were social networks of that time ?

I understand self-hosted boards would still be available to teens under this law.

Otherwise, I don't see how algorithmic generated content benefits teens if the goal is to participate in a community.

This is yet another instance of "Think of the children":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

I'd like to add that this may have outsized unintended effects like COPPA did - COPPA being the law that established that accounts online required you to be 13. I was 12 when COPPA went into effect. What a lot of people don't know about COPPA is that there is a provision to allow for children under 13 to have accounts with proven parental permission. My parents would have allowed me - I'd been online for 8 years at that point and they were both techy types who could supervise me. However, it wasn't worth the extra logistics for companies, so they just outright banned anyone under 13.

Likewise, if this is enacted in enough states or the logistics of figuring out which people to track becomes too burdensome, I'd expect to see sites not letting anyone under 18 use them and to start collecting everyone's information.

Which would have some really bad second-order impacts. In addition to the impacts others have mentioned on minority populations, I have two main concerns:

- Cutting off the parental rights of those who want to be permissive with their kids. My parents didn't believe in content restrictions; the one ideological idea they agree on is free access to knowledge. I was given an adult library card at 5-6 and full Internet access at around the same age and discussions on how to interpret what we saw in the news/in media/etc. was a common discussion point. My mother is from a media studies family and my father's family are tech tinkerers. Families like mine will be functionally unable to raise their children as they would prefer.

- More relevant to society as a whole, sure, let's ban their access until they're 18. Then when kids move out/leave at 18, not only do they have to navigate the world, they have to be introduced to social media with absolutely no oversight. And 18 year olds are legally "adults", so companies will have a group of completely defenseless people to take advantage of who can be held to their bad decisions. (Think like credit card companies who hang out at freshmen college/uni events). It's similar to raising the driving age: While raising the driving age does prevent accidents, the highest rate of bad driving comes from new drivers. If the driving age is lower, those new drivers are more likely to have people to call if they do get into trouble and make their mistakes when they're less likely to ruin their lives. Likewise, the worst effects of social media will be felt by those who are new users.

How likely is it that today's teens simply check the "I am over 18" box and set themselves a fake birthday that is Jan 1 from 20 years ago? I've been 25 for the past 25 years, after all.

The problem is that you can't easily verify whether someone is 12 or 14 with documentation so the checkbox is all they had. You can easily verify if someone is over 18 and there are systems in place to do so, which means it's highly likely if this takes place that ID is going to be required. (I mean I also just lied after COPPA, but I was pissed to lose so many accounts that I'd signed up for honestly in 95-99.)

Are the kids going to get around it? Yes. (And good, that's one way to develop a healthy skepticism as well as some systems thinking.) But it's going to be way harder and likely involve forging documents or impersonating particular adults. (I can see a reverse of a situation I had growing up where my parents used us as shields against piracy accusations: "Ooops, sorry, I'll talk to my kid. They're totally the one who downloaded this game." nudge nudge wink wink where children act through their parents - it's not like it's hard for a 15 year old to take their mom/dad's driver's license and use it). Those actions are more likely to be punished, whereas a simple lie is 'kids will be kids'.

Perhaps the kids will start forging ID cards as foreign nationals with completely fictitious ID templates (or just say "not from Utah").

The main thing COPPA failed at was that iirc the parent who wanted to allow their child on the platform would have to physically email their approval to the operator of the site in question.

Nobody wanted to make their address accessible/wanted to pass the hordes of physical mail that would end up at that address (see the inherent issues with any public email address and spam), so this quickly fell to the wayside in favor of the pinky promise you're above 13 checkbox.

For what it counts, outside the US, minimum age for this sorta thing (although there it's more about general data processing, not some weird "think of the children" nonsense) is often higher.

Here for example you're not allowed to have a Google account if you're >=16 years old, end of story. Still skippable with a checkbox (and from what I know any teenager just does that), but the age being at 13 is not at all a standard.

I don’t understand how social media companies will enforce this without requiring an ID for any signup. Even then users could just select another country. Without enforcement this is just as useless as click link to verify you are 18 or enter birthdate.

Sounds more like they are protecting against children consuming toxic or mind numbing content.

> Sounds more like they are protecting against children consuming toxic or mind numbing content.

If that was the case it would not exclude comments on digital news websites. Those are usually a cesspool.

I doubt anyone thinks reading those comments are good. They just made the carve out to avoid including news sites in the ban.

I think this is a little less sinister than you are making it out to be. To me, it reads as the intent of those exemptions is because those sites (CNN, Fox, ESPN, etc) exercise editorial discretion around what content is posted and, presumably, should be more active in moderating/enabling/disabling discussion comments. Sites like reddit (since you mention r/exmormon) while are user moderated ultimately escape liability behind section 230.

It's a separate debate for us to argue what is more harmful to children/minors/teens - news/sports/entertainment media vs social media but with our current legal framework these exemptions kinda make sense. If what you are worried about is brainwashing, being solicited, general harm from both users and algorithms, its probably true that that is less likely to happen to a kid in the comments section of an ESPN article than it is on reddit/4chan/tiktok/instagram - and when it does happen at least there is someone to hold somewhat responsible.

I think you have recognized a significant part of the motivations behind this, but you're missing a key detail: pornography.

The Corporation for the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - which is currently embarrassed to be known colloquially as the Mormon church - has declared "pornography" to be one of the most menacing and dangerous things in our society.

Most of the people in Utah's government, including the governor and both senators, are active members in the Mormon church. "Active" is a key word here: it is not by any means a casual relationship, especially if you want political support from other Mormons.

The narratives surrounding porn as "a threat to children" tend to conclude that all content a child interacts with must be curated to protect them from that danger.

It's trivial to just blacklist pornhub et al with DNS filtering. You can't go blocking Reddit or Facebook, though: that would be an overreach, placing you clearly in the realm of "helicopter parenting".

This law has two effects:

1. It gives parents the social excuse to invade their children's privacy: It's the law's fault now.

2. It gives parents the social responsibility to invade their children's privacy: it must be irresponsible not to.

To invade a child's privacy is to do harm. This law, and all of the intent it came from, demands that harm be done in the name of safety.

"Children's privacy" isn't a thing. They are wards of their parents, whose basic fucking job requires they have some clue where the kid is and what they're getting up to.

Then you bring up porn, something illegal for children to be accessing anyway. You are aware of this, yes?

Shame on parents for daring to uphold the law in their own homes.

Legality is not morality.

It is a parent's responsibility to ensure their child is safe, and that does involve some level of intrusion. It doesn't mean reading their diary or listening in on every conversation they have with their friends. How else can a child learn healthy boundaries?

Is it really a surprise to you that many humans under the age of 18 are watching porn? A vague legal threat never stopped me, and it's not going to stop most teenagers. No matter what the law says, that is the reality we live in.

As I see it, changing the legal age for porn consumption would be a political nightmare, not because it's hard to argue that teenagers should be allowed, but because it is hard to argue that teenagers should be marketed to as direct consumers. Personally, I find this entire situation counterproductive, but the tacit allowal of teenagers to watch porn (and not necessarily pay for it) without prosecution has been a workable compromise.

I think it's far more likely this bill is due to the high teen suicide rate in Utah.

[1] https://utah-health.shorthandstories.com/state-of-suffering/...

Good point. I hadn't even considered the Mormon angle. I've learned so much about Mormon culture on Tiktok that blew my mind.

Is it a bad time to mention that sites like stack overflow, discord, sub stack, medium, Reddit, hacker news, GitHub, YouTube, and so forth have the same traits - the same identifying markers - as what we consider traditional social media sites?

How the bill defines social media:

10) (a) "Social media platform" means an online forum that a social media company 160 makes available for an account holder to: 161 (i) create a profile; 162 (ii) upload posts; 163 (iii) view the posts of other account holders; and 164 (iv) interact with other account holders or users.

There’s exceptions for email, Netflix, Amazon, news, traditional media kinds of sites.

https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/static/HB0311.html

Just more of the unintended consequences we all know will come from this.

Given how the government reps talked (hah) to the TikTok CEO, and some of the speeches leading up to that farce, I’m pretty convinced it’s entirely intentional.

It gives power and eyeballs back to the entrenched traditional media moguls.

There won’t be any. Look, it’s fun to imagine these shitty lawmakers getting bit by their own laws applied to the letter but that’s not how it will go. The law will only ever be enforced against social media platforms they see as threatening their ability to shelter their kids.

I think it says a lot about any politician that pushes for laws that are meant to be selectively enforced.

It’s not the lawmakers who will be bit, that’s true. It’s any company, and their users who are targeted by an incensed enough Karen.

Picture a GitHub.io site that hosts images of nude art.

> Look, it’s fun to imagine these shitty lawmakers getting bit by their own laws applied to the letter but that’s not how it will go. The law will only ever be enforced against social media platforms they see as threatening their ability to shelter their kids.

It’ll be enforced against whoever individual citizens decide to enforce it against; its a purely private right of action.

Ah, that's the carveout against the 1st amendment.

Conservatives have discovered that the constitution only binds the state, so if they delegate enforcement to private lawsuits they can completely bypass protections.

Edit: see https://theintercept.com/2023/03/24/texas-bounty-hunter-drag... and https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-abortion-law-bounty-hunte...

I don't understand how any court allows this interpretation to exist. If a state deputizes a person to act against the rights of others, that person is acting as the state, and should be bound as the state is bound. Otherwise the state can abrogate all limitations on its powers by deputizing people or companies.

Because it turns out a lot of the higher courts in the US are absolutely captured by people who let their religion and or ideology and or private opinion affect their judicial decrees. This has been the case since even before Dread Scott though so I don't know why we have ever pretended otherwise

Just like Texas did with abortion. Allow citizens, who I'm sure contain some number who want to enforce their morality on others, to enforce the law.

This is fascism. that's it

Yes, and a 13 year old should absolutely not use any of those services.

Discord in particular has become known as “groomercord” for it’s open pedophilia.

I haven't read the bills yet but according to the article it applies to children under 18.

17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsh*t, for the same reasons I would now. (So does dad me, incidentally. My kid's messages have always been her business, not mine.)

I'm sure many of us wouldn't have been a programmer if we hadn't had access to SO/Github around 17.

Now I feel old.

Absolutely zero chance, SO was the only resource on the internet that had simple enough explanations for me when I started out programming at 11.

I was making PRs to oss projects on Github and churning through Project Euler by 15.

I literally owe my entire career to SO which is weird to say typing it out now.

Reading these comments about people relying on SO - a site founded in 2008 - at age 11, doesn't make me feel any younger, and I'm not even that old (inching closer and closer to my mid-30s). I got into Linux and bash/Python scripting by following tutorials on random shady sites and reading official documentation and manpages. Let's just say it wasn't as seamless as Googling an issue and having a SO thread directly answer my question.

Yes, I do realize I now sound like I just said "back in my day, we walked to school, uphill both ways".

Yea, it was actually wild when SO came out, because I'd been teaching myself lua pretty much independently, and by the time I got to high school, SO just barely on its way out and immediately everything was a lot easier.

Old man yells at cloud, but kids these day won't even have to look at code, everything will be filtered through natural language.

"I feel old" on the internet can mean 15yo to 80yo, so you have all the right to feel old at mid-30s lol

When I learned my second programming language (JavaScript), I asked most of my questions via a mailing list. It's quite weird trying to recall it... I almost forgot how mailing list work today.

Right? I learned through reading browser documentation in elementary school when CSS and JavaScript were implemented and then running to my dad or internet forums/chat rooms when I ran into topics or problems I didn't understand. None of us knew what we were doing. It was great.

Certainly you participated in related forums right? Before SO I was much more involved in online communities like https://gamedev.net/ which are also at risk due to this sort of bill.

I actually did not, for some reason. I was on a bunch of phpBB forums in high school, but none surrounding programming/tech. I was obsessed with music and gaming way more than IT stuff, back then. I initially learned programming more as a means to an end (my first scripts were to automate backups to an external drive, transfer stuff between Windows/Linux, that kind of stuff), and just generally for my own enjoyment, than a real plan to do anything with it. I don't even think I realized it was a potential career path before I was already out of high school lol

I'm sure our parents would have all let us sign up for a programming site. This bill still allows for that.

Who will pay GitHub to not only install age validation but parental bypass (also with validation)?

I don’t believe they even allow under-13 today due to COPA laws.

Of course this focus on the age 13 is completely missing the point that the actual age gate is 17.

The good part about the COPPA law is that it's an IQ test. If you're under 13, you have to be smart enough to understand that it's a "don't ask don't tell" situation and know to keep quiet. I did when I was 10 and joined Yahoo (the most popular social media site at the time) so I could have a Geocities web site and play fantasy baseball.

I'd suggest that teens in Utah just use a VPN but social media sites have been cracking down on VPN users for years and many of those sites now require phone number verification to sign up. This law illustrates yet another reason why that's a bad idea.

Looking back on my youth, I think these age verification check boxes were my earliest disregard for authority. I understood the checkboxes were there because there was a law that wanted to prevent me from accessing an online service. I thought the law was stupid, and after contemplating it for days decided to ignore it.

> I don’t believe they even allow under-13 today due to COPA laws.

COPPA. COPA was the second attempt (after CDA, which was the first), COPPA was the third and the one that stuck.

You underestimate how hard it might be to get your parent to sign some weird consent form from a "github" site, especially if it asks for a picture of the parent's ID (to ensure the kid isn't accepting the terms on their own behalf).

Ok, a picture of parent id is ridiculous. I didn't know that part.

Technically it's not spelled out, but chances are Utah law enforcement / regulators won't accept a tech company's measures if a kid can just say another one of their own emails is their parents' and can then consent to the social media access themselves. Everyone affected by this will likely outsource it to a company like Stripe with their Identity product, where you're entrusting Stripe to do the ID verification and to delete the data once it's been verified.

Good thing gp made that part up then.

> I’m sure our parents would have all let us sign up for a programming site. This bill still allows for that.

But would the site let you sign up if even with parental permission if it had to do additional identification verification to identify that the permission was from your parent, and was liable for (1) actual damages if you got addicted [0] because of some element of their site design, and (2) huge ($250,000 per feature) penalties if they also didn’t do quarterly audits to identify, and within 30 days after identification eliminate, any feature which might addict you?

How many programming sites see minors in general, much less Utah minors specifically, as that important to their mission to take on the extra costs and risks this bill imposes on serving that population?

[0] Using an intentionally broad definition of addiction

GitHub is not being banned. Neither is SO.

What part of the bill provides them an exception?

>What part of the bill provides them an exception?

For Github? 10(b)(i)(N), to the extent that source code files are “documents”.

For Stack Overflow? 10(b)(i)(J), which was probably written for LinkedIn specifically.

Reddit is also an incredible resource for niche, constructive topics like learning how to build a computer. You could draw the line anywhere you want for social media.

I mean, this is why it's a common thing to append reddit.com to your google searchs nowadays. Seeing how others solved problems or getting a feel for their opinions on certain things is actually super useful.

So that's why I didn't become a professional programmer. SO and Github hadn't been invented yet when I was 17.

You’re thinking about it wrong. How many people that you knew when you were 17 would have become programmers if the current resources existed.

See also: survivorship bias.

> I'm sure many of us wouldn't have been a programmer if we hadn't had access to SO/Github around 17.

I'm sure many of us didn't have any access to StackOverflow and GitHub when we were around 17 years old, because StackOverflow and GitHub didn't exist yet. For several of us, git didn't exist yet. Heck, for some of us, the web didn't exist yet!

Kids these days...

I’m kind of surprised but also not surprised in the outrage over the “draconian bulls*t.” The problem I have as a parent is that I can see it causing real social damage to adults around me, my own kids, and kids around my kids. Anti-social behavior, Disrespect for authority, extreme violence is easy to see and normalized (stuff that would normally be considered traumatic), wokeness and anti-wokeness is normalized (must we all have such strong opinions?). I’m talking behavior way more at extreme ends of the polarized spectrum and at earlier ages than what I grew up around.

It’s basically force-fed opinions at a global scale, how can that possibly be healthy? We can barely fathom how this media impacts adults as it stands. All this clear evidence aside, I feel like it’s obvious, how can the absence of these things do any measurable harm to kids?

Regardless of your ethical stance on the subject, it would be a good exercise to consider who you're ok with determining what kind of content your children can view. Allowing a government to step in to pass laws like this is a draconian step too far.

As a parent do you not already have all the tools you need to ensure your children don't use tik Tok? From the light touch and mundane, using the built in features of the operating system (parental blockers and app timers are available on Android and IOS) to the heavy touch of not allowing your kid to have a smartphone.

Why do you want the government taking over this role for you? Maybe there's some parents who don't care if their children are on tik tok. Why should they follow the same parental strategy you have?

I do think this a reasonable rebuttal, but there must be some middle ground here. Generally speaking, I can block TikTok sure, but because it’s so ubiquitous, my kids are ostracized because all their friends have access to it, they still pass around the content like drugs, alcohol and tobacco. It almost becomes one of those things that because they’re not allowed to have access to it, it does just as much damage, socially.

There are three general categories of parents on this, and to be clear, I don’t think any of these are bad parents: 1. Those who are extremely weary and tech savvy, like myself 2. Those who are weary but have no earthly idea how to set up these controls effectively. 3. Those who don’t give a f*all about it at all.

I tend to believe it’s just as bad but it’s about as misunderstood as tobacco used to be. The industry KNOWS it’s bad for kids, it’s been proven bad for kids but it’s peddled to them anyway.

All that aside, let’s just say hypothetically I wanted to manage this all myself and wanted the government out of it, sounds good in theory. The tooling around limiting inappropriate content is mind-blowingly inadequate. At the very least this should be mandatory and more concretely standardized. I’m not flatly against giving kids some access to it but it’s reached a point where my kids can’t even do their homework at all without full access to all of Youtube which by itself has loads of content not remotely appropriate for elementary school kids. Youtube kids is a joke.

It’s pretty frustrating as a parent to manage content restrictions for the 3-4 major browsers, search engines, youtube, messenging apps, iphones, macbook, windows app store, and so on. This could be a full time job. Then, the kids bring home a school provided chromebook or login to chrome with a school account which has no content restrictions at all and I have zero control over anyway. Honestly, parental controls in the current state is largely a waste of time.

The overhead of managing content restrictions on families devices is a very good point. I'll be reaching this stage soon and I'm not looking forward to this additional task.

I also think state sponsored content moderation should be used to restrict access to harmful online media as opposed to lumbering this task on individuals. As you've mentioned, some parents need this enforced upon them.

If we were talking about vaping, which is still highly unregulated and available for children to buy, I'm sure the majority would be in agreement about age restrictions. The fact that we're talking about preventing psychological addiction and trauma makes it harder for people to agree on the harmful effects of this type of content. It's simply not as visible as the huge plumes of oil-steam breathed out by every 12 year old in a bus stop these days.

However, I don't agree with the implementation of content moderation proposed by Utah state. It's totally unworkable and poorly thought through.

Doesn’t the fact that drugs, alcohol and tobacco (which are already illegal for kids) are available in this way illustrate how useless a ban would be?

If you want to protect your kids from these things then you need to educate them and get them to enforce the rules themselves.

The vast majority of 13 y.os do not have access to drugs, alcohol and tobacco.

Uh...are you a parent of teenagers? Because that statement is not true and smacks of Ivory Tower thinking.

I mean it’s somewhat true, if it were legal for 12 year olds to have these things AND it was marketed toward them, way more kids would be have it than not. That’s not to say they can’t get it now, but it’s harder and somewhat self regulating because the stigma around doing something illegal.

This doesn’t invalidate your point (I think your correct that making it illegal provides a disincentive and reduces overall uptake), but I should note that making something legal does not necessarily mean making it legal to market it towards kids.

Case in point being that here in the UK it is illegal to market tobacco products at all (including to adults in this case). This also applies to politicians, prescriptions medicine and a bunch of other things. And IMO it’s often a good compromise that allows for harm reduction without outright banning something.

This probably varies depending on where you live, but where I grew up (in a small town in the UK), the vast majority of 13 year olds did have access to drugs, alcohol and tobacco (which didn't necessarily mean the vast majority were indulging in those things, but they were definitely available).

Yes, parental controls are not are replacement for teaching kids why this stuff is damaging. It’s not an excuse to be lazy parents. Kids need to hear their parents say it (with the why). Setting limits instead outright blocking can be helpful. It sets the stage for letting the kid decide if they would consider what they just watched be viewed as inappropriate, which believe or not does happen, but some content really shouldn’t be available to them at all.

I also want to recognize that in the case of Utah’s implementation，it likely doesn’t have my best interests in mind so I do see your point. There’s always a possibility of an agenda which isn’t necessarily “good for kids.”

Maybe what we should focus on is more standardization, effectiveness of controls and requiring these trillion dollar companies to build parents one single pane of glass to monitor and control content for all platforms. May not even be feasible but it really just sounds like another engineering challenge that requires a major investment to get it done.

Many of us != most of us. What I said and what you said are not mutually exclusive.

Many of us, older people, had access to similar things that made us interested... in the 70/80's it was computer magazines (paper magazines, that is) as people got their first home computers and could follow along programming examples, play games etc. If you ran into trouble, you needed either help from someone you already knew or you would have to find a book or manual.

In the 90's most teens already had access to a primitive internet where they could chat with anyone in the world using BBS[1], which was not too different from a modern social network. Email was already a thing as well for some time, but probably became widespread at this time... by the late 90's the internet was already quite similar to today for geeks, except perhaps videos (and even high resolution pics) were not a thing due to the low speed of the net.

StackOverflow and GitHub only came around in the late 2000's, which is basically yesterday. Before them, there were similar sites as well (the infamous expertsexchange for SO, and SourceFourge for GH, for example) for quite some time, but they surely became very dominant in their areas.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

And I know these. I'm not "punched card old" but I did start learning programming before SO got traction. And I remember how big the difference SO made for my own learning/career path, compared to mailing lists.

As a side note, my first intern job was to make a localized ripoff of SO (within a team, of course). It was still a relatively shining new thing by the time.

Cool... it's just that your comment seems to imply that a lot of programmers were learning their basics when SO was already there to help us... that's only true for those of us lucky enough to be really young, like in their 20's :D. Hope you understand many of us are well past that and watched GH and SO take over the world as a very recent phenonenom.

Uh, yes, this is why I said "many of us" not "most of us". (not sure why i need to repeat this...) Of course I know people who are in 20s are not necessarily the absolute majority of HN. But there are still many of them.

> I said "many of us" not "most of us". (not sure why i need to repeat this...)

We understood it. Not sure why you think we didn't.

Really? Because there are about 20 comments under their original post with the tone of “um actually many of us didn’t grow up that young”.

Wow I'm almost 50 and I have been interacting through forums (first one on minitel when I was 12), bbs, newsgroup since I was a young teenager. Maybe github or stackoverflow didn't exist but they were plenty of cool places where to exchange.

> Heck, for some of us, the web didn't exist yet!

Haha...I learned when the web was mainly AOL. MSN at the time had pretty good forums which helped a lot. But the main place I was learning programming from was books, but they were expensive - especially for a college kid. When I would run into problems I couldn't solve I would head to the book store with a pencil and paper and copy bits and pieces that I hoped would help. Then head back home and try again (talk about a long debug run loop). Luckily this was around the same time of the rise of big bookstores where they encouraged hanging out so no one ever questioned me.

I remember having to send an email to the admin of sourceforge for permission to have a project and thus CVS access. "Please sir may I contribute to open source?"

Oh i feel so old.

I probably wouldn't be a programmer without sourceforge.

I probably wouldn't be a programmer without ordering floppy disks full of random source code by post from software-by-post catalogues - one letter to ask for a catalogue, get the catalogue in the post, send them a letter with your order and a cheque and receive a bunch of disks a week later...

You have no idea.

Before StackOverflow it was PAINFUL. Staring at "Reached end of file while parsing" errors and wondering wtf that even means...

Then finding out after 5 hours that you missed a semicolon.

Oh, and forget rounded borders, what a f@#%king nightmare.

Oh I have a lot of ideas. I started learning programming before Stackoverflow got traction. Plus I'm not a native speaker and by the time I didn't really speak English at all. So I practically needed to learn what "Reached end of file while parsing" means in plain English, then tried to find out that I had missed a semicolon :'(

Hmmm...all I had was a blank screen and a Byte article.

> 17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsht, for the same reasons I would now.
If anyone thinks that this bill is going to keep 17 year olds from accessing everything from Reddit to GitHub, they are going to be very disappointed.

It's kind of wild to see so much of these comments insisting that anyone under the age of 18 be locked up and prevented from accessing basic internet sites and* encouraging laws that would force every site to implement strict ID verification just to use it.

Did everyone just forget what it was like to grow up with draconian content blockers at school preventing you from getting to benign information on the internet?

I don't think people instituting such laws are young enough to remember contet blockers at school.

> draconian content blockers

most school content blockers were pretty easily bypassed in my experience. i was in school relatively recently, my highschool had fortinet which sucked (sni blocking + blocks a bunch of protocols), but tor still got through if i used a bridge. i probably could've used a vpn but tor was easier. before highschool there wasn't anything more than dns filtering (and briefly http host blocking but not sni blocking) which was bypassed by approximately everyone (who wanted to bypass it). most people used random vpn apps, i changed dns, both worked fine.

> My kid's messages have always been her business, not mine

This is such a hilariously bad take. No wonder kids are so screwed up with parents having an attitude like that.

Agreed. It’s not even a take it’s just a concerning statement. They should care.

The bill explicitly calls out “Utah minors”. That is, everyone in Utah under 18.

Agreed.

Hacker News had a good run. I'm going to miss it when it's decided that tracking enough PII on its users to be compliant with this law (and the ones that will follow) is more trouble than it's worth to Y-Combinator, but so it goes.

The open forum era was a grand experiment, and the experiment is winding down.

Can you not just vpn in to Canada with me for the time being? I mean hopefully they don’t implement it site wide for all regions I can’t imagine them doing that.

I'm not sure how VPN'ing to Canada helps.

This is a Utah law and for now I don’t think most companies will implement it site wide but rather just comply with state laws. So vpn into Canada would not trigger the age verification.

That won't be sufficient for companies to comply with the law. The way Utah's law is structured it is incumbent upon the company to determine whether a user is a Utah citizen or not. I haven't seen anything to suggest the courts will decide that a simple IP address filter is sufficient to be considered compliant.

Why should a 13 year old not use GitHub?

They still can with parental permission.

If Github wasn’t confident that (10)(b)(i)(N) excluded them from coverage, they probably wouldn’t allow Utah minors to use the site at all (and the same would be true of any other covered or potentially covered site) because, even if they are allowed parental access, of the civil penalty and actual damages for “causing addiction” (under the statute’s non-clinical definition of “addiction”), only the civil penalty portion of which is avoidable with costly quarterly audits. It is a whole bunch of dumbass liability that can be almost entirely mitigated by excluding Utah minors, and if that does economic and developmental harm to Utah, that’s not the sites’ problem.

I agree, and along that same logic we should also be extremely concerned about what the local libraries are up to.

What about YouTube? Lots of educational material there. Fits all of the points.

There is YouTube for kids which is meant to be more stripped down.

Meant to be, sure.

Ends up being this weird blend of "disturbing kid crack" videos that you really shouldn't leave a child unattended with. The whole "Peppa Pig Drinks Bleach" stuff was only the shallow end of the darkness of the stuff generally tossed in the "Elsagate" category.

There is no "safe" way for a... oh, 2-7 year old, I'll be nice, to use the internet unattended. I've seen an awful lot of it out and about.

I've found YouTube kids content to be significantly worse than general YouTube content. Not to say that there isn't a lot of content inappropriate for kids on YouTube, but the Kids version is explicitly designed to target kids with addictive content. The advertisers targeting children for their products is brutal on YouTube Kids. Since pushing my kids onto the full YouTube, they are consuming better content.

90%+ of the useful interactions I have with other humans working on interesting problems is through Discord these days. If I have an issue with a library, or run into a tough to solve physics problem, basically anything where I might want to talk to someone more knowledgeable or experienced than me the answer is hop on a discord server and ask. It's absolutely asinine to deny this resource to kids.

At least we're teaching kids the basics of computer security by forcing them to circumvent these restrictions, and I have full faith than they will. Most kids are much more technologically literate than someone who would unironically type "groomercord".

By who? Source?

> Discord in particular has become known as “groomercord”

Nobody without sufficient brain-rot (ironically likely caused by social media) would call it that.

Known to whom? I've never seen it called that.

I've never heard it called "groomercord", ever. A google search for that term doesn't find anything, either.

I dunno where you're finding all this discord pedophilia, is this a self-report?

I have heard Discord mentioned a few times on CP catcher

https://m.youtube.com/@CPCatcher

Discord is where my friend runs his youth DM games where he carves out a safe space for teens to dip their feet into playing D&D and having healthy interactions with adults on his discord server. We keep it PG-13 and it’s fun. I’ve been giving a kid pointers on AI art generation.

It’d be sad if all them got run off because of hysteria about them being “groomed”.

Stack overflow and github are the only ones that feel out of place there.

Stack overflow and GitHub both allow you to make public posts and interact with others. The text targets public user posts and interactions between users explicitly.

Whether the consequences are intentional or not is still to be determined.

but are they made available by a "social media company"? and should that be relevant?

Well, here’s their definition of such a company (from the same link):

155 (9) "Social media company" means a person or entity that: 156 (a) provides a social media platform that has at least 5,000,000 account holders 157 worldwide; and 158 (b) is an interactive computer service.

So, size is really the only relevant discriminator.

> So, size is really the only relevant discriminator.

No, its not, see the vast horde of use/function based exclusions starting at line 165 comprising code section 13-63-101(10)(b).

None of which clearly protect GH or SO, the subjects of this thread branch.

> None of which clearly protect GH or SO, the subjects of this thread branch.

I disagree, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35310413 (especially considering that because this law creates a penalty, and because it restricts speech, its definitions of the covered parties and conduct must be read narrowly – and its exceptions read broadly [0] – per the rule of lenity in statutory construction.)

[0] if, in the first instance, it is Constitutional at all.

> There’s exceptions for email, Netflix, Amazon, news, traditional media kinds of sites.

The fact that there are 20 categories of services exempted shows that this is a terrible bill that is based on punishing specific actors and not regulating data privacy or child wellbeing in a meaningful way.

for reference, line 165 to 224 of that link are the exceptions:

"Social media platform" does not include an online service, website, or application: (i) where the predominant or exclusive function is:

  (A) electronic mail; (B) direct messaging [only between two users],  (C) a streaming service, (D) news, sports, entertainment, or other content that is preselected by the provider and not user generated,   (E) online shopping or e-commerce [when limited to posting reviews and wish lists], (F) interactive gaming, virtual gaming, or an online service, that allows the creation and uploading of content for the purpose of interactive gaming, edutainment, or associated entertainment,  (G) photo editing that has an associated photo hosting service, if the interaction with
 other users or account holders is generally limited to liking or commenting, (H) a professional creative network for showcasing and discovering artistic content, (J) providing career development opportunities, including professional networking, job skills, learning certifications, and job posting and application services,  (K) business to business software,  (L) a teleconferencing or videoconferencing service,  (M) cloud storage, (N) shared document collaboration, (O) cloud computing services, (P) providing access to or interacting with data visualization platforms, libraries,  (Q) to permit comments on a digital news website, if the news content is posted only by the provider of the digital news website, (R) providing or obtaining technical support for a platform, product, or service, (S) academic or scholarly research, (T) genealogical research

(J) is a carve-out for linkedin, wonderful.

LOL, according to this, my family's group text thread is illegal under this law, as DMs can only be between 2 people.

EDIT: serious question; would Slack be professional networking or, how does that work under this bill? It's DMing for business, but it isn't really networking.

Group chats wouldn't be illegal, that's not an online service where you sign up and make a profile etc. This applies only to sites that would serve you random content from random users... i.e. Social Media.

Most Slack usage I’m aware of doesn’t fit the description, but some does. Quite a lot of Discord usage however…

That would not need a carve out for private messages between two profiles

> as DMs can only be between 2 people.

Nothing in the law restricts to DMs being between two people, it just distinguishes them from public content.

As I understand it,

> (I) shared between the sender and the recipient; 171 (II) only visible to the sender and the recipient; and 172 (III) are not posted publicly;

maybe sender and recipient can be considered a group chat with multiple recipients? Otherwise you wouldn't classify something like Kik or Discord as social media.

Facebook starts a career networking subfeature in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

You can already apply for jobs on Facebook. (J) already applies to Facebook.

edit: This is false as of 22 Feb, when Facebook Jobs was discontinued. I didn't realize.

This seems like a reasonable list.

I’m not opposed to the idea of whitelisting healthy online activities and limiting anything else. They could go further and whitelist sites like HN, arch forums etc where it’s educational

Sibling comment mentioned how group chats aren’t exempted. I’ve seen group chats get very unhealthy before. 2 is low, maybe 5 or 8 participants max would be ok.

I hope you realize that every adult in the state will now have to verify their state ID to use an account on virtually any website so that the site can prove they're only serving adults. These lists of IDs will leak.

I mean when teens/children congregate in large numbers anywhere they get unhealthy. Like it or not, the digital realm is part of life and they have to learn to handle disagreements, toxic people, etc. at some point. If their adults won't supervise them/help them, that's on the adults. If they can't, then our society needs to start educating adults on how to parent in the digital age. But that would be slow and cost $$$ and possibly empower the populace, so we won't do it.

>(F) interactive gaming, virtual gaming, or an online service, that allows the creation and uploading of content for the purpose of interactive gaming, edutainment, or associated entertainment,

So Roblox, arguably quite harmful to children, is specifically carved out. That's great.

Whats going on at Roblox? Curious, as a parent myself.

Isaw twice similar comments but I didn't spend time to found it :/

This article and thread lists some of the issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014754

History of adults masquerading as children for purposes of pedophilia.

History of adults masquerading as church leaders for purposes of pedophilia.

The church is often on their "team" so it gets a pass for rampant child abuse. Notice none of the groomer allegations are directed at the church despite the church abusing exponentially more children than people in drag. There is no global drag organization which is protecting members found to be abusing children by moving them into new areas where people don't know their priest is a pedophile the way we see in the church. If the "protect children" cries were honest, the churches and clergy should be one of the primary targets.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/religion/nearly-1-700-priests-c...

> Nearly 1,700 priests and other clergy members that the Roman Catholic Church considers credibly accused of child sexual abuse are living under the radar with little to no oversight from religious authorities or law enforcement, decades after the first wave of the church abuse scandal roiled U.S. dioceses, an Associated Press investigation has found.

> These priests, deacons, monks and lay people now teach middle-school math. They counsel survivors of sexual assault. They work as nurses and volunteer at nonprofits aimed at helping at-risk kids. They live next to playgrounds and daycare centers. They foster and care for children.

> And in their time since leaving the church, dozens have committed crimes, including sexual assault and possessing child pornography, the AP’s analysis found.

Highly addictive to my kids for reasons that I can't grok.

Unfettered social interaction with other participants in an unmonitored environment that superficially 'looks' like a video game. This social interaction leads to bullshit purchases. Not purchasing the bullshit leads to peer pressure and bullying.

Is it a technical problem? is it lack of content moderation? or do social networks that are catered towards children simply lead to a toxic environment? I can't say if it's more one or the other, which makes it a challenge to try and fix.

I watch my son play Roblox sometimes. The chat is heavily censored.

He also learned most countries, their capitals, and their flags. And that was just a few servers with "country balls".

I find the YouTube videos involving those far more insidious, because children don't really understand biting sarcasm and satire as well as adults, and I'll often make him switch videos.

But I haven't noticed anything necessarily harmful about Roblox.

Then again, don't they make like a billion dollars a year?

I'm more upset that they screw content creators so badly that the "bullying and peer pressure" seems to be necessary.

Roblox is one of those things that seems impossible on a technical level. And with a billion dollars, they could hire social workers, moderators, etc.

But have you actually played Roblox? It’s absolute toxic trash.

Almost every single game is a front for purchases, and those that aren’t are barely games at all. Many Minecraft mods are one time purchases that are way, way better than anything Roblox produces, but Minecraft is so buggy that it’s truly not suitable for kids, or anyone for that matter. Minecraft will continuously corrupt saves, so you need to fully reinstall the game, and log out of your Xbox/MS account and fail to authorize.

I grew up on counterstrike and StarCraft mods, and there is nothing available today that fills the same role. I’ve played chess implemented in StarCraft, DOTA before it was standalone, and zombies maps that wouldn’t be brought to other shooters for years ahead of time.

My kids aren’t allowed to play games I wouldn’t play. The list of actual-games-that-arent-ads is huge, and there is no need to let in Roblox.

>Minecraft is so buggy that it’s truly not suitable for kids,

>My kids aren’t allowed to play games I wouldn’t play.

Nothing says 'hacker mindset' like your parents deciding for you what games you should and shouldn't like.

This is such a difficult topic. On one hand I want to give the next generation the same freedoms that I enjoyed but on the other hand the “game” has gotten more… everything. Even adults can’t avoid falling for these traps. I’ve seen with my own eyes someone justifying spending USD 90+ on candy crush saying it isn’t that much compared to bla bla.

It is a frightening thought though to think — am I more conservative than my parents?

I'm certainly not. Though i have different conservations in different directions than they could've ever dreamed possible, i doubt that adds up to anywhere near the real conservatism of watching Bill O'Reilly or god forbid Tucker Carlson every night

considering nintendo and sega cartridges were upwards of 60 1980s US dollars, compared to the amount of "game" we get now for the same price, it's almost a wash.

Freemium games make sure there's enough "there" there to keep casuals almost happy. The trick is to make the $5 and $10 premium purchases let you do around 4-12 hours of gameplay advancement, but that's it. Consider something like Shop heroes (or whatever) where you can put thousands of hours into the game for free, a day or two "skip" for $10 isn't a good value proposition. But skipping a week or a month? maybe after someone has put $10 in a few or several times and gotten that little jolt they want to feel the big jolt of a lot of money.

I know i spent around $100 in the blizzard RMAH (Real Money Auction House) on diablo III and it netted me nothing - nothing at all. So i learned my lesson real quick. Real money for virtual goods is a non-starter.

Now as far as robux goes, I want my child to understand that it's ok to pay people for their work (designing the levels, making items/skins). So he can choose to spend his money on hotwheels, paints, robux, google giftcards, whatever, $5 at a time. I do sometimes make a frowny face when he chooses robux, though; because as i said, a billion dollars!

I would play most any game that isn’t in app purchase multiple-premium-currency trash. I have multiple consoles and macs, so most things are covered.

Games explicitly banned: Roblox, for ads and IAP

Minecraft, because the second time I had to reinstall it on a ps5 to fix a corrupted installation was too much.

Any game by gameloft, etc. If it has a purchase price it’s probably fine. I also don’t let my young kids watch game of thrones.

I would not let my child pay for in app purchases period. They are entirely built to trigger the same broken mental pathways as gambling and we generally try to avoid letting kids gamble

Sure sounds like a game that will suck and go unplayed if kids just aren't allowed to click the buy button. Children don't have to have access to spend money online and a parent is well within their right already to not add a credit card.

That one change would make Robolox a terrible game based on how you described it. Isn't that problem solved without the need for a complex law full of arbitrary definitions and one-off carve outs?

> Many Minecraft mods are one time purchases

> Minecraft is so buggy that it’s truly not suitable for kids, or anyone for that matter.

> Minecraft will continuously corrupt saves you need to fully reinstall the game

I don't recognize the game you are describing. I've never heard of a paid minecraft mod, they're all free. Buggy? It has some odd in-game behavior that you could reasonably call bugs, but the only crashes I've ever gotten were during modding, caused by incompatible or low quality mods. Corrupting saves? I've never experienced it, nor can I imagine how a corrupted save would be addressed by reinstalling the game. What is the supposed connection between a save file being corrupted and needing to reinstall the entire game?

You've obviously got some strange prejudices about this game which simply don't resemble reality.

Roblox is neopets afaict

There's a game engine/a large variety of games combined with a common community. The games can be silly, but they're silly with other people who recognize they're silly, and others who aren't in on the joke yet

My kids never paid anything on roblox. Also, the bullying you describe sounds like issue with real world bullies in group ofnkids your kids know personally. That sux and is hard to fix, but blaming roblox is weird. I would blame those kids parents.

That sounds a lot like any other childhood in my opinion. Sure I wasn't feeling pressured to buy digital assets on an online game but I would noticed when half the school has the same LL Bean fleece jacket or backpack with their initials embroidered on it.

Was there peer pressure and potential for bullying based on what others had? Absolutely. Should a state have intervened with a required mandatory dress code and government-approved backpack? Hell no, there's always going to be peer pressure and bullying no matter how oppressive laws become.

People Make Games is one of the YouTube channels that I respect in this domain...

Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers - https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ

Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. - https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY

Basically every negative aspect of modern gaming at once. Loot boxes, exploitative use of user-created content, unmoderated interaction between adults and children, free-to-play treadmilling to peer pressure children into spending money, etc etc.

user-created loot boxes are the pinnacle of the current gaming environment

Twitch as well

Twitch's gambling phase was brutal and no doubt harmful.

There are a lot of J) category content on TikTok. They should have just curated and mandated a kid's version

I don't know how to judge a bill, but I read this, and it seems that the intent is to broadly ban everything first and then carve out exceptions for almost everything except for a single category: Direct messaging (^B) between MORE than two users for non-creative, non-commercial, non-educational purposes.

AKA forums and memes.

Is that a fair analysis?

[edit] : per privacy advocates - no, I don't think it's okay to start with a law that bans everything and carve out exceptions; obviously, that way lies totalitarianism. I'm just trying to get a handle on the immediate intent. There's a boolean at work here. I guess someone was like, "hey, why chip away at forums and meme sites when we can just ban everything in theory, let most of it slide, and work back toward totalitarianism from there with the law already in place?"

[edit2] HN appears to be totally banhammered under this since /the mods/ don't post the news.

> HN appears to be totally banhammered under this since /the mods/ don’t post the news.

Does HN have more than 5 million user accounts?

I guarantee that there are more than 5 million bot accounts alone.

Ooh I’m curious to hear more. Do you have inside knowledge, or see widespread evidence of bots? I’ve only seen perhaps a few here and there, almost always downvoted to oblivion.

It's not just bots posting, but other bots upvoting those posts. If it can get on the bottom of the front page for even 5 minutes, that's probably x > 1000 clicks.

What does it matter whether it has more than 5 million accounts? Why not 50K accounts?

Because every law we write is ultimately arbitrary. Lines have to be drawn through massive swaths of gray area, those lines are entirely arbitrary and should be a sign that making laws like this is pointless.

The 90s Era gun ban that Biden was so proud of is a perfect example. They had to include so many caveats and arbitrary descriptions of what makes a gun an "assault rifle" that manufacturers just dodged the rules with tweaked rifle designs. Something as small as a thumb hole in the grip made a gun legal because of how specific the law had to be.

In this case, what stops a social media company from coming up with some business model where a child company is spun up for every 4.9m users? You could argue its more like Mastodon, a decentralized network that just happens to use the same proprietary protocol, app, and is owned by the same parent Corp.

Marginalium: Some laws are arbitrary, not all. They may all be contingent, which is different from arbitrary. Ultimately, law is a prudential determination of moral principle.

The distinction between arbitrary and contingent is very muddy in a legal sense where arbitrary has a specific meaning related to laws and court decisions. The two relevant definitions of arbitrary are:

> based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something

> law : depending on individual discretion (as of a judge) and not fixed by law

A law itself fits the first definition. At best, a law is written by a tiny minority of the population but with the intent of best reflecting the majority opinion or preference.

I'd be really interested to hear an example of a law that is based on necessity or intrinsic nature, though maybe there are a few!

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arbitrary

I meant where does this law mention 5 million ?

Hah, sorry! I misread your question and have been thinking a lot about that topics lately!

It matters because that’s the cutoff in the law. If you want to know why that’s the cutoff in the law, that’s a question for the authors, sponsors, and supporters of the law.

It seems they’re worried about peer to peer interactions.

My experience regulating my daughters internet access is that interactions with other kids have the highest potential for toxicity.

They seem ok with kids passively consuming a stream of adult generated content.

They’re also excluding SaaS which just emulates desktop software.

I think that’s about right.

Kids can be mean to each other, now or in your day. Next they ban kids from talking to each other in person or having friends. Is that the life you want for your daughter?

Guess we should ban all teens from stack overflow, LinkedIn, and hacker news because kids might have toxic interactions online if we don't.

Let's also not mention how the only way to reliably do this is to require identity verification from all adults. Get ready to scan your drivers license to post on hacker news and every other site (except traditional news sites apparently).

Utah is small enough that some sites may just geoblock Utah. I know if I had to choose between collecting every user's ID ever and just adding a block list, I'd go with the second.

How do websites handle under 13s? Blocking the United States?

I would support this. Downvote away.

Apparently videoconferencing with kids is AOK while chats are not?

> (F) interactive gaming, virtual gaming, or an online service, that allows the creation and uploading of content for the purpose of interactive gaming, edutainment, or associated entertainment,

Doesn't this loophole even defeat their own hidden agenda? Almost every online game today features a chat function.

I think Discord even passes that.

Seems that forums are exempt, look:

content that is generated by an account holder, or uploaded to or shared on the 270 platform by an account holder, that may be encountered by another account holder;

We believe something first and then we add our reasoning for it. That is what it sounds like. Which seems appropriate for a religious state like Utah.

> that there are 20 categories of services exempted shows that this is a terrible bill

This is how privacy died. Someone fought for everything. Compromised for everything but twenty. Nobody supported the fight.

Then, when the deal was announced, out came the pitchforks for perfection.

Doesn't G exempt Instagram? And isn't Instagram allegedly among the worst social network for teens?

Texas had to do similar exclusions for their "anti-censorship" anti-moderation bill. [1][2]

[1] https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/872/billtext/html/HB00020F...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_House_Bill_20

The list of bills that don't require long lists of arbitrary definitions and exceptions is ridiculously small.

Making laws that cover millions of people is way too complex for something so detailed. There's no way around that complexity leading to a pile of garbage legal mumbo-jumbo as they realize it's nearly impossible to draw a neat line around the problem.

(J) applies to Facebook as well.

edit: This is false as of 22 Feb, when Facebook Jobs was discontinued. I didn't realize.

If you've got professional contacts on Facebook, or if you're following businesses, I think it would count?

"preselected by the provider"

This is the area that gets grey. If the provide applies any filter or AI judgement it becomes preselected. This applies to tiktok, facebook, youtube and ig.

This law bans old school forums and reddit but not if results are displayed by "best match"

I owe my entire professional career to the Megatokyo forums and the associated IRC server.

   (G) photo editing that has an associated photo hosting service, if the interaction with
 other users or account holders is generally limited to liking or commenting

Does this mean the 2012 version of Instagram is rendered immune to this law thanks to this obnoxious Google Photos carveout?

>(J) is a carve-out for linkedin, wonderful.

It would be utterly fascinating if LinkedIn became Utah's de facto LGBTQ online space.

And (T) is a carve-out for the genealogy industry run by the Morman church

I don’t consider Reddit, HN, etc. to be social media, at all. There might be media, but there is no social. Social requires a network of real people. You can’t prove that anyone on these sites is a real person, other than yourself. Maybe I, and everyone else on here, is a bot. When everyone is anonymous, there is no network. And, not only is everyone anonymous, but there are no connections. To the best of my knowledge I have never read a post or comment from the same “person” twice. Every single interaction might as well be (and probably is) our first interaction on the site, ever. Complete strangers passing in the dark.

Interesting argument.

Can a site without discrete named accounts, where everyone is called 'Anonymous', claim that there's no way to verify whether the content is generated by humans? It's basically the 4chan model.

Thank goodness teeangers will still be able to frequent 4chan just like I did when I was a teen.

No need to even do that.

The law defines 'social media platform' in terms of what account holders can do, and 'social media company' in terms of the number of account holders.

It really goes out of its way to distinguish 'users' and 'account holders', and if there are no account holders, it’s not social media. Apparently.

So kids can visit 4chan, but not TikTok. Makes sense.

If we ignore the content associated with them, 4chan and other imageboards are actually a nice low-speed format for casual online interaction: the content is divided into threads, the board catalog can only hold some amount of active threads, threads have a finite lifespan measured by post count, threads are auto-pruned after a while, there's no secret sauce algorithm to game your attention span (catalog has simple rules for sorting by thread activity and such), visual content is limited, etc.

Reddit used to have an actual community, things like in person meetups and its own culture based on various in-jokes (bacon,narwhals, etc) and behavior expectations. It was pretty social I'd say, though now it's basically just an aggreator and not that different from google news for various interests.

There is a point to be made that anything coming from Meta is just designed by its makers to destroy your mental health for ad clicks. Other companies do not have such toxic business model even Tiktok.

Oddly enough, 4chan is not part of that definition.

There's an edgy 12 year old somewhere in my head cackling and gleefully shouting 'Let the good times roll!'

I think that people aren't giving enough credence to the reason Utah gives for the restrictions: The teen mental health crisis.

Social media has radically changed the social lives of adolescents, and as a result anxiety, depression, self harm, and suicide have all skyrocketed. The data on this is not ambiguous [1].

And there's now a lot of evidence that social media and smartphones are the cause of the crisis: they screw up childhood in a way that has serious health consequences [2].

Time spent in person with friends by 15-24 year olds has dropped from an average of 155 minutes per day in 2003 to an average of 42 min per day in 2019, a drop of 3x [3, figure 4]. How could that not have huge effects on psychological health?

I think these restrictions are a good thing - it's a crude approach and will have some negative consequences, but the scale of the health crisis requires something to be done.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...

[2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

[3] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report

I don't have any answers to the problem but teen mental health issues have grown quite a lot since social media.

My wife works in PICU and she has never seen so many suicide attempts in all her career (going back to 2006) as she has in past few years. She talks to other doctors who come from other areas and their concerns/experiences are the same.

I feel like every week she is talking to me about some new kid's attempt.

> My wife works in PICU and she has never seen so many suicide attempts in all her career (going back to 2006) as she has in past few years.

Social media has been around a lot longer than the last few years. (In fact, while they weren’t even the first wave of widely-used-by-young-people social media, both Twitter and Facebook opened to the public in 2006.)

There have been a few major events that have occurred in the last few years, though, that aren’t social media that might relate to the effect under consideration.

I will continue posting links to Jonathan Haidt's review docs all over this thread.

Social media and smartphones became widespread in the early 2010s, and that's exactly when teen suicides started rising. [1]

COVID does not appear to have significantly affected teen mental health [2]

If you have evidence that something else is driving the rise in teen suicide rates, I'd love to see it.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

[2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report

> Social media and smartphones became widespread in the early 2010s

Among adults (or in “household” surveys where adults were surveyed? Sure, but the majority of teen internet users were using “social networking sites” in 2006.) [0]

If your contention is that adult social media use is driving teen suicide rates…well, that’s actually more plausible than teen use, but none of the policy responses address that.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/05/21/part-1-teens...

It isn't just social media, it is the combination of social media and smartphones. This makes social media far more pervasive in a teen's life.

See section 6[0] where they discuss how mental health declines correlating with Facebook coming to college campuses and with high speed internet arriving in cities for some evidence.

[0] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

> the majority of teen internet users

This stat can't be meaningfully compared to teen suicide rates because the latter is across all teens, regardless of online/offline status. If the number of "online" teens grew dramatically between 2006 and 2013 (as I suspect it did), then the relative change in percentage of "online" teens on social media would be a fraction of the much larger change in teens in general.

My personal experience growing up around then is that a majority of my peers weren't deep in social media and smartphone use until well into the 2010s. I didn't have a smartphone when I graduated high school in the early 2010s, and I certainly wasn't an outlier at the time.

I think they were referring to lockdowns, not covid. Kids weren't really affected by covid, but lockdowns and school closures were massive. To see if there was an effect on this from that you'd have to account for duration and severeness of lockdowns in various places, not look at overall rates.

> I think they were referring to lockdowns, not covid.

Both were among (but not, even together, the totality of) the things I was referring to.

> Kids weren't really affected by covid

A massive wave of death, incapacitation, and serious illness that very likely struck sonewhete in their families? Kids may not have had particularly severe acute health cobsequences from COVID, but that doesn't mean they weren't affected by it.

The link I posted is data for the change in teen mental health between 2019 and 2021. The data incorporates all of the effects of COVID, Lockdowns and school closures, and does not show a significant change from pre-pandemic trends.

I was using "COVID" as a shorthand for all of the changes during the pandemic.

> The link I posted is data for the change in teen mental health between 2019 and 2021. The data incorporates all of the effects of COVID, Lockdowns and school closures

Yes, my point is that is exactly the problem with your data. It needs to be broken down by location to account for differences in lockdowns and school closures, to claim there was any or no effect.

> If you have evidence that something else is driving the rise in teen suicide rates, I'd love to see it.

Will reality do?

Over recent generations, kids have systematically been robbed of critical developmental environments - primarily they are denied regular hours of unsupervised alone/peer time and expansive areas to free range.

The environments that kids absolutely need to develop social and problem solving skills have been replaced with ceaseless supervision, ceaseless containment and a soundtrack of false messaging about risk from stranger kidnapping (spoiler: FBI stats are clear that kids aren't and haven't been at meaningful risk of stranger kidnappings). At the edges of all that are justice systems/LEO/authority that stand ever-ready to transform routine stupid transgressions into forever penalties that systemically ruin future life/job/housing opportunities.

We adults have erased their life prep and endlessly notched up pressure on every front. What else do we expect to follow that except poor mental health?

As for social media's part, one has to take a lot of nuance out of teen mental health studies to single out SM as the primary driver of bad mental health. ref: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/21/blaming-social-media-for...

> Social media has been around a lot longer than the last few years.

Setting aside the (valid and important) point about the lockdowns, it also took time for social media to evolve into its current form. Snapchat and Vine came out in the early 10’s and TikTok in 2017. Twitter has never been especially widely used; it has outsized influence because corporate media types use it, but it’s not what the masses are scrolling. Social media might not be new, but the short-form video style of social media has taken off a ton in the past decade.

At the risk of speculation, I’d also surmise that this is a major part of the problem. Humans have a primal desire to interact face to face. Full motion video of people talking to the camera is sort of a junk food version of human interaction. It’s the same reason watching people play video games on Twitch is more engaging when you can see their face in the corner of the screen, and why so many YouTube thumbnails include some recognizable face either looking into the camera or expressing an emotion. Photos and text don’t scratch the same itch, so they’re less addictive.

(Some people can be addicted to text-based social media. I am one of these people. But we were the ones who got addicted to webforums and Usenet; probably not the typical user.)

I’ve been calling social media companies “the tobacco companies of the mind” for years.

Modern social media like Instagram and TikTok are not even social. They are just skinner boxes that crowdsource and amplify addictive content to keep people staring and scrolling. Social media started to stop being social when algorithmic timelines, weighting of content for engagement, and monetization were introduced.

The next major innovation in the field will be pure AI generation of the feed. No more human sources at all, just endless amounts of mindless addictive filler fine tuned for each person.

You can already see it on kids channels on YouTube where the content is at least part machine generated and is pure mindless drivel. The adult version is coming I’m sure.

Edit: actually I think Replika may be the first adult AI Skinner box of note. Imagine that model crossed with TikTok.

It's amazing how differently my toddler reacts to classic Schoolhouse Rock math videos (examples: "My Hero Zero" and "It's Elementary, My Dear!", both from around 1973) and the educational content with soulless, repetitive backing music that YouTube puts up after them.

It would be interesting to see also how much time are couples spending with their kids as it seems to be more common to have now both parents working long and tiring hours (purely observational). With the continued increase in the cost of living it would be reasonable to think that many kids are actually spending more time alone at home, particularly those in lower income families.

Kids hanging out with classmates on Discord instead of in person certainly leads to a reduction in teen pregnancy

As a parent I'd much rather my kid gets pregnant in high school than kills themselves. I witnessed and experienced first hand the mental health issues that Tumblr caused so I consider myself qualified to speak on this.

Tumbler is a giant mental health issue enabling echo chamber.

Some doctors could probably make an entire career out of trying to fix that place.

I'm still not convinced teen pregnancy is a bad thing. We evolved to have children pretty young. Running after toddlers is way easier when you're younger than when you're in your 30s.

If I'd had kids at 19, they'd be almost done with high school by now. And if my wife had decided to be a stay-at-home mom at 19, she would have been done with the most time consuming parts long ago and well into whatever she decided to do after that part of her life.

> And there's now a lot of evidence that social media and smartphones are the cause of the crisis

There's one pesky problem with that assertion: social media isn't a pill. It's not a chemical in the water, or a bacterial infection. It's not a binary switch. Social media is content. Social media is interaction. To treat such a thing as a scalar value is to have meaningless data.

What are the implications of removing a child's access to social media? Does it keep them from getting bullied? Does it keep them from obsessing over their looks? Does it stop them from hearing criticism about their parent's religion? All of the above. Every one of these is a strong contributor to the mental health of children.

By insulating children from their peers, you can avoid a lot of damage: damage that has become significantly more available and engaging than ever before.

By insulating children from their peers, you can avoid a lot of growth: growth that has become significantly more available and engaging than ever before.

This strategy is not a solution: it's a workaround. You get the pros and the cons in equal measure. Surely we can find a better way.

---

The obvious problem with social media - that is actually specific to it - is engagement. That applies much more broadly to our society than the mental health of children. It applies to our political divide. It applies to our economy. It applies to every human relationship that it can.

What children - and the rest of us - really need is a viable alternative. Something that their peers will follow them to. Without that, there is no solution: only avoidance.

Whether this is a reasonable law or not, my big problem with it is that it puts the burden of enforcement on tech platforms rather than the kids' parents. There is no way for any company to check for something like this without also affecting every other user of the site, whether they are in Utah or not and whether they are a teen or not. What do they do exactly, start collecting government IDs from us before every visit?

Call their bluff - don’t make your service available in Utah.

Honestly this seems like the best idea. You can’t get accused of letting a kid access outside approved hours if you don’t allow people in Utah on.

What about adults? They may be lying kids. So either no access (safer) or strict age checks involving checking licenses and stuff. But that’s expensive. No Utah is easier.

How do you know they’re in Utah? IP addresses. Blocks people outside Utah? Sorry, our lawyers made us do this. Complain to your reps that Utah is messing with your state’s citizens. VPNs? Maybe gotta block that too.

Utah is not a big state. The social networks could easily use this to try to “teach a lesson”. Just say you’ll let Utahans back in when their government makes a foolproof age verification system.

And wait.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the intent of the law, it just seems unenforceable/unimplementable, as usual. No benefit to the social networks but huge legal downsides.

Lmao imagine Utah becoming the most mentally healthy region on earth, suicide rates plummeting, productivity up 300%, people spending time with parents and grandparents again? record sign ups in sports clubs, record birth rates etc.

Be careful what you wish for ;-)

If the state has total control over every aspect of their citizens' lives they can model the population into any perfect utopia they desire. I'd still not like to live in that world.

Isn't this the opposite though? They're not telling people how to live their lives. They're taking away the power Facebook has over many people's lives so people might enjoy their lives in more social and healthy ways again.

"any legislation restricting behavior actually frees people to do what they always wanted (the government knows best what that is) but just couldn't because of all these other possibilities misguiding them"

"there should be no laws against tobacco, alcohol, drug abuse, gambling because people can't possibly be misguided by powerful corporate interests for profit or otherwise"

That's not what I said. There is a balance to be found. I only objected to "this restriction actually makes everyone free (to do what I think they should)" being used as an argument. If enough people agree, sure, you can ban social media. The reasoning should be a cost benefit analysis though, not "my laws shall make you free".

Yes, balance is important. I guess if the law is passed then enough people agree...

They’re also taking away the support some marginalized people may get from social networks (eg LGBT, uncommon religions for the area) that their local community doesn’t provide/discriminates against/their parents hate.

Social networks, for all their faults, are not pure evil. They can be beneficial for some people.

Do you think one would have to be on a network with at least 5 million users to get this sort of support as opposed to a smaller one, perhaps specifically oriented towards this sort of stuff? The latter is as legal as before I think.

If you join the GaySupportForum, it’s really obvious why. That could be problematic or even dangerous for someone.

If you join Facebook, it doesn’t signal anything because everyone is on Facebook. Or Instagram. Or TikTok. Or any of the other called out platforms.

I said "perhaps". Just join a social network with less than 5m users without "gay" in its name then. This attitude of trying to help a monopoly and pretend it's good just baffles me.

And your argument is that you’re ok with the general harm these cause to most people for the marginal possible benefit for a very small minority.

Notwithstanding the fact that many so-called marginalized minorities are also terribly bullied online.

I’m not trying to advocate either way, just pointing out it’s not as clear cut as some people in these comments act like it is.

> Isn't this the opposite though? They're not telling people how to live their lives.

Is this not exactly them telling people how to live their lives? "Live offline."

Not offline, just not using social networks. Same way kids can drink juice, water and pop but not alcohol. Should kids be allowed to drink alcohol or smoke? Again, if I see this as a public health measure I think it makes sense.

> If the state has total control over every aspect of their citizens' lives they can model the population into any perfect utopia they desire.

That has never worked before. I don't think it'll work in the future.

Are you referring to China or USSR by chance? Hardly utopias.

It's not about every aspect of life but a few key norms. I see this predatory social media like gambling if not worse, and gambling is regulated in most places

I’m sure you’re writing all of this in a “yeah, that’ll teach em” voice, but this all sounds amazing. Please, let social media block everyone, become irrelevant, then bring back the old internet.

I expect if it were to happen there would be a very large outcry (in Utah at a minimum) and the law would be changed/repealed quickly.

It would be a VERY interesting natural experiment if it stayed in effect. People would find ways back on, but not everyone would be willing to go through the hoops. What would that do in even a month or two?

I suspect it would improve things drastically in Utah. That’s what I’d bet on, anyway. I’m a libertarianish person, so I don’t love this legislation, but… I’m not gonna lie. It half makes me want to move to Utah.

While you may not like the current method of communication and congregation, you must understand _why_ we have the first amendment, right? Congregating together and discussing ideas of (nearly) any sort is an absolutely vital part of democracy and a free society

People (like the one above you) don't care about the first amendment as long as their favorite things aren't affected.

...and that's why the first amendment exists.

They're excited about the idea of those sites blocking users in general. It's not really a first amendment thing. That comment isn't focused on the broader context.

I’m sure someone else will cook up a new way to talk to people online after we’ve all decided the current one needs to go; nature hates a vacuum. The current manifestation is not helping anyone though.

Wouldn't web forums, usenet, etc all be considered social media under this bill?

Software Developer is the most common job in Utah, it's kind of surprising this happened despite that.

Software developers are more anti tech than most.

It's not surprising at all for Utah. That is a highly Mormon run state that has strong stances on how you should live your life. Even if you are a "goi" (I use the word loosely to illustrate the cultural metaphor in a us v them mentality) to them.

What is amazing is that they have this strong stance on how to restrictively govern the people inside their borders, but yet expect to have a western lifestyle support them. More organizations should stand up and say "I'll pass" in a blanket ban on them.

> That is a highly Mormon run state that has strong stances on how you should live your life. Even if you are a "goi" (I use the word loosely to illustrate the cultural metaphor in a us v them mentality) to them.

I think you're crossing a line here. You are accusing the Mormons in Utah of having a us-versus-them mentality. But your own comment tries to turn readers against Mormons.

Never forget: The Missouri Executive Order 44, also known as the Mormon Extermination Order, was issued on October 27, 1838, by Governor Lilburn Boggs. The order authorized the expulsion of Mormons from the state and is sometimes referred to as the "Mormon Kill Law". However, the order was rescinded by Governor Christopher S. "Kit" Bond in 1976.

I think we should all be more charitable to Mormons after what they've been through.

That was 185 years ago, how charitable have Utah mormons been this year to the LGBT community? The unspoken intentions of this bill given the state's recent legislative priorities are absolutely horrifying and far more deserving of criticism and deep skepticism than charity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/8:_The_Mormon_Proposition

Being through some shit isn’t a reason to alienate everyone else though.

Yeah because the Mountain Meadows Massacre 19 years later wasn't an us vs them mentality or anything

Mormonism was persecuted because it was a sex cult and it refused to follow American law.

I live in Utah. If that's what happens, that would be awesome! "Sorry kids, no fb/tiktok/insta and there's nothing I can do about it. None of them work where we live"

Would be a huge win for all parents. No social media, and we don't have to be the bad guys taking it away.

Another Utahn here and I feel the same. I don’t really see how this could work and think it will probably go away quietly, but I’d kind of love it if these platforms (and the social pressure our kids feel to be on them) just went away.

Is love to see Instagram, etc, replaced with a static site in Utah asking people to vote for better leaders.

Utahn with two young kids, yes please!!

Hopefully this is hyperbole. Seems a bit extreme to hope the government legislates away industries because you don't want to handle the parenting yourself.

You have to show id to buy cigarettes. How hard is it to id people before account creation?

The quote was "Call their bluff - don’t make your service available in Utah.", it didn't mention ID.

I would love it if you would state what you think the viewpoint opposite yours is and then try to defend it, then explain why that defense is wrong.

> legislates away industries because you don't want to handle the parenting yourself.

What are your thoughts on pharmaceutical/heroin legislation? What are your thoughts on making it illegal to advertise unhealthy food to kids? How do you feel about the idea of product placement in children's TV shows? How do you feel about letting pharmaceutical companies directly market to children?

You look at parenting as black and white. Good parents would prevent their kids from doing bad things. Bad parents can't prevent their kids from doing bad things. "If a kid does something bad then it is because they have bad parents."

The reality is that parents are just one element of the childs environment and that their choice to do bad things can be fit to a bell curve based on the complete set of environmental factors for which parenting is one element.

Holding parenting ability constant, the government could make changes that would improve outcomes for some set of children.

> I would love it if you would state what you think the viewpoint opposite yours is and then try to defend it, then explain why that defense is wrong.

Sorry, I don't know what this means.

> What are your thoughts on pharmaceutical/heroin legislation? What are your thoughts on making it illegal to advertise unhealthy food to kids? How do you feel about the idea of product placement in children's TV shows? How do you feel about letting pharmaceutical companies directly market to children?

The comment this chain is replying to was about tech companies not offering their services at all in Utah. I'd think, for the most part, I'd be against most regulations that basically say "to protect the children, we will ban X for everyone". I'm sure there are exceptions though.

> ...rest of the comment

I agree, the government can act to improve the outcomes for children and I didn't state anything to the contrary. Rather, I believe that gleefully accepting or cheering on a ban of all technology, for both adults and children, that the government might believe causes harm to children is quite unfortunate.

> Sorry, I don't know what this means.

You called something hyperbole. You said you had a hard time imagining someone in good faith wishing that the government would legislate away an industry so that they don't have to "parent."

So I asked:

  What do you think the person you are responding too's position is?
  What do you think is the best defense for that position?
  What do you think that position is wrong despite what you see as its best defense?

I think the tobacco industry is an obvious industry to make reference to. I think now days most people who don't smoke would be happy to see it regulated away and I think it would be an extremely fringe position to think the tobacco industry should be able to advertise to kids today.

> I'd be against most regulations that basically say "to protect the children, we will ban X for everyone". I'm sure there are exceptions though.

Just because we don't know the full extent of how bad Facebook is now, doesn't mean it isn't bad.

How bad do you think we thought smoking, opiates, or other problems were before we decided they were bad?

We saw the correlation with harm of tobacco, investigated more deeply, then regulated their wide spread use particularly use by children.

Facebook is modern day tobacco.

I am much less black and white about this than you might expect, because I am generally pro letting people do what they want with their bodies. After the age of 25 (when a person's prefrontal cortex is fully developed) there are few good arguments for preventing a net tax payer from doing what they want to their bodies or time. If someone can be told they are old enough to die (or kill) for their country, that's another factor that makes limiting their freedom to make bad decisions a hard argument.

> that the government might believe causes harm to children is quite unfortunate.

When you say "the government" that is entirely jaded. There is more nuance than us (the oppressed) and them (the government). Replace the government with "my fellow neighbors," and I think it harms the anti-government righteousness a bit.

The context of the original conversation was clearly not about banning Facebook, but about not being sad if they went away. Telling facebook it can't do business in utah if it serves children and Facebook deciding to not do any business in Utah as a result is not banning Facebook.

> What are your thoughts on pharmaceutical/heroin legislation?

The USA government already makes the incorrect decision regarding these substances by criminalizing them, banning them, and throwing users in prison. Evidence shows that legalizing these substances and providing addiction care and universal healthcare, as well as tackling homelessness with empathetic solutions (literally just give them housing, it's that simple), is the so far most effective method to reduce usage of these substances.

Thus the highly retributive, reactionary USA government, or its local manifestations, can't be trusted to make these kinds of laws well.

Great, it banned tik tok for the kids. It passed a morality law. You know, fox news isn't really news, and some have suggested to that it provides a direct path to radicalization that leads to political violence. We should probably ban that, too. Don't worry, if you want to watch it, you can unlock it by applying at the local Office of Moral Wellbeing, just provide a photocopy of your photo ID and proof of address for them to file. That way if Fox changes channel registration, they have a list of all the people that watch it, so they can send someone to let you know the channel number changed.

I agree with the first half.

TikTok is a national security issue and a reciprocity issue and for that reason it was a bad choice of example.

You can look at other social media as a morality problem. I could see why someone would think of it that way, but we are literally quite governed by our neurotransmitters, and these companies literally have "engagement" (read: addiction) engineers. There are literally addiction engineers working on creating the state of addiction. Engineers working on figuring out how to get people to spend the maximum amount of time possible on the apps.

At some point it becomes a health issue. Stimulus is stimulus. Dopamine dysfunction is real.

What's the difference between scrolling an infinite feed for 10 hours and feeling good on an opium den couch for 10 hours? I am not saying that's a perfect comparison, but I don't think it's as simple as morality. These social media apps cause real biological response and there are engineers literally working on manipulating those responses.

I agree with you that social media is a social toxin. Kind of like alcohol or heroin.

The solution for all three I think is the same. Don't allow the government to pass laws criminalizing these things, because that has bad outcomes. It's a lot easier to say "the government isn't allowed to restrict bodily autonomy" than it is to for example try to write into law the 800 different specific exact scenarios where society thinks abortion is ok. In this case, "the government isn't allowed to pass laws restricting access to information" or something along those lines.

Certainly we should allow our government to offer alternatives, information on the negative effects of a toxin, treatments, and use our governments to ensure good social safety nets that prevent people falling into toxin abuse as their only escape.

I'm talking about the problems of using the State to enforce whatever given values or ideals. The State is at best completely imperfect, at worst, it's fascist and trying to kill you and people like you. Don't let it get to that point, don't let it ban what it today defines as "social media."

There are better ways to protect society from these harmful things. Mostly I think solutions around good public education.

I don't think criminalizing is the right approach. I think taxing them for usage that exceeds a reasonable amount of time might be a reasonable policy. I think it would be ok to 100% tax any advertising profit gained after 1 hour of use. I suppose that creates a conflict of interest because then the government directly benefits from over-use which is its own hazard. I think the most American approach would be to codify that Facebook (or other social media) is directly liable for medical treatment related to social media use creating a feedback mechanism that disincentivizes bad behavior.

I don't know what to do, but I do think social media is becoming a cancer, and I do think we need treatment. I don't now what the treatment is.

I think you're saying the treatment can be worse than the disease, and I agree.

> I'm talking about the problems of using the State to enforce whatever given values or ideals.

I think we probably agree on a lot politically, but this is where I think I take a hard turn.

Somewhere bad faith behavior must be discouraged. Education is one place that happens, the legal system is another place. Education is only a first line defense against bad faith.

In the game theory of daily life, defectors and defection cannot be a winning strategy otherwise society will turn from a high trust society into a low trust society. Consensus will be abandoned in favor of dominance. To be honest, I think we are already to that point.

Human rights are an example of an ideal that the state must enforce. Contractual obligations are an ideal a state must enforce. Rule of law is an ideal that a state must enforce. Property rights are an ideal states must enforce.

Where it becomes less clear is the Fox News case you stated because Fox News is actively trying to destroy the idea of rule of law.

I don't know how to deal with that.

Do you think that's a problem? Should nothing be done?

> I think you're saying the treatment can be worse than the disease, and I agree.

Basically yes.

> Where it becomes less clear is the Fox News case you stated because Fox News is actively trying to destroy the idea of rule of law.

I only use the Fox news example as a wake up call to conservatives cackling gleefully as the government of Ohio shutting down access to a social media platform.

Actually the core of my fear revolves around that: the American government at all levels, in any state, is highly reactionary, and I'm afraid of it using its newly discovered power to get away with this sort of thing to start banning communication among leftists. Or, something I think it will try in the next two years, banning communication among LGBT people.

Well, I guess this is where I wish communities had more power to organize their own protections and arrangements. Imagine if one town wanted to ban fox news for example, the USA government would probably step in and enforce a lawsuit against them. It seems the power dynamics are out of wack.

> I would love it if you would state what you think the viewpoint opposite yours is and then try to defend it, then explain why that defense is wrong.

Ok, this would be opposite: I want absolute access to my 17 years old kids account. I want read all their messages with their friends and I do not want them to have any privacy, because I want to fully control them.

Second part of the opposite: I dont want to talk with my kids about social dynamic in their peer group. I do not want to talk with them about beauty standards, realistic or not. I do not want to help them navigate peer relationships and I do not care about my kids thoughts. My idea of solving these issues is to cut their access to communication methods.

I am not about to defend either.

> What are your thoughts on pharmaceutical/heroin legislation?

I am actually fine with whole bunch of regulations and law. Really, this dichotomy where if you dont like one law you need to hate all of them is ridiculous. It

I hope that corporations more frequently put less relevant jurisdictions in their place and remind representatives that they are in competition with other jurisdictions and this overrides their public service ideas.

So I’m more of a fan of seeing that. Not the actual outcome.

Would make more people choose more collaborative solutions faster.

Honestly if social media companies pulled out of Utah, I could see tens of thousands of families choosing to move to Utah for that reason alone.

Social media, crypto, gambling and the cigarette industries should be legislated away. Yes.

> Social media, crypto, gambling and the cigarette industries should be legislated away. Yes.

Ironically posted on a social media site (Hacker News has the characteristics of "Social Media Site" under this definition).

Reddit would also be gone.

It's funny to read all the comments from people who think "social media" just means "sites I don't like"

I'm always very unimpressed by this kind of argumentation. There's a clear difference in kind between Hackernews, Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok. Sure, they all feature user-submitted content, but to pretend that there is any meaningful similarity beyond that seems silly.

In the eyes of the law, they are essentially the same.

> There's a clear difference in kind

Is there? Is there to your 80 year old senator and their constituents that think the internet is a series of tubes. You know, the constituents that actually vote?

Does it matter how well you explain it anyway? Modern political language lacks definition by design. Do street interviews and ask Americans what socialism is. Then ask them what they'd call the government giving banks money. Then ask them how many times in the last 20 years the government has given banks money.

My argument is that we should just not let the governments pass these kinds of laws because it opens the door to using these laws to arbitrarily block whatever website they can vaguely hand wave as "social media" or whatever they pick.

I'm always very unimpressed by people who believe that politicians have the intellectual capacity to differentiate between HN and Reddit.

They don't, especially when they're throwing their weight around after screaming about internet boogeymen for years.

Go watch the Tiktok hearings. They were losing their minds because filters could track your eyes and your cell phone could use the internal wifi network in order to access the internet.

>Reddit would also be gone.

Don't threaten me with a good time.

You can ban social media as a parent today and damage your child's social life.

If it's banned for every child equally, they will have to meet up irl or call each other like in the 80s or whatever. Whatever the alternative, it shifts the dynamic and doesn't isolate your child.

Regulations for kids is not simply about bad parenting but can be about prisoner's dilemma-like situations where everyone needs to work together for a good outcome and, unless a decent percentage gets on board at more or less the same time, it's counterproductive for individuals.

We should also enforce strict school dress codes so students don't have to see other students wearing new shoes and feel pressured to update their wardrobe right? Kids shouldn't be able to talk about family vacations because it might make other students jealous and hurt their mental health. We need to ban these books because it might make kids feel bad about themselves. Where do these ridiculous steps end?

Hacker News would fit the definition also

I don’t know how I feel about living in Utah if I couldn’t use GitHub, YouTube, stack overflow, most blogs, or any of the dozens of websites I enjoy.

I lived there for a few years in college and while I’m somewhat surprised the law passed, I’m not that surprised.

From other comments, it seems the definition is not "what you assume is a social media app" but "any service with over 5 million users that facilitates chat via posts". I am 99% certain this includes Hacker News, Steam, probably also bugs.chromium.org and bugzilla.mozilla.org, and maybe even any website that allows user comments if they happen to have over 5 million users.

> From other comments, it seems the definition is not "what you assume is a social media app" but "any service with over 5 million users that facilitates chat via posts".

It's baffling to read all the HN comments encouraging draconian restrictions and forced PII collection on websites, all with the assumption that it will only apply to websites I don't like.

Laws like this, if enforced, would make a lot of the sites you use on a daily basis require strict ID verification. Are you really ready to be doing the ID verification dance with GitHub, Reddit, Hacker News and every other big site on the internet just to post?

Of course not. You're going to sign up for a VPN and use it, just like all of the 17 year old kids who just want to use the internet like normal people.

I welcome it. Breaking the way the internet is used these days would be a huge win for society as a whole no matter how painful it might look at first.

You want full corporate control and mandatory remote attestation on your devices to comply with these laws?

Some people love being controlled

There are benefits to reducing anonymity: accountability, trust, relationships, etc. It's why humans evolved to recognize faces so well. We decide who to trust based on experience. It doesn't matter who controls the identification process, so long as its done fairly. And if corporations or government misuse identification for self-serving purposes, we should certainly push back.

There are also downsides to reducing anonymity - many more than benefits.

Like what?

Two off the top of my head:

- Chilling effect on political discussions. Good luck campaigning to overturn these laws if you can't do so without fear of reprisal from government officials or your local community.

- Limiting the ability for marginalized groups to seek support; LGBTQ youth, ex-mormons, etc., would be directly harmed by this.

Why would your local community attack you for campaigning for anonymity?

It doesn't necessarily have to be these laws, it could be anything, but to answer your question - they might paint me as somehow being "against the children", having bought in to the angle that these laws make children safer.

Just curious is the any different from what happens right now, when someone campaigns against something you disagree with? If someone online, pseudo-anonymously posts something that is perceived to be against trans rights or pro-life, there is already a mob of people working to de-anonymize and punish them for their wrong-think. How is it any different or better to have the current system?

> Just curious is the any different from what happens right now

Because right now you can be anonymous/pseudonymous? Of course people will try to unmask you, but I'm contrasting it in a world where you can't even attempt it.

But what’s the benefit if any time you actually espouse an unpopular opinion you will be unmasked.

There's a difference between _guaranteed_ unmasking, and not.

Thank you for your time.

> And if corporations or government misuse identification for self-serving purposes, we should certainly push back.

The time to push back is now, before we give them this power.

I don’t think that’s where this goes. I think this leads to less internet use in general. Just like when Apple broke Facebook’s mobile tracking the ad dollars dried up and forced Facebook to scramble to find a new tracking mechanism which most agree is subpar and thus that revenue hasn’t returned. I’m hopeful that people spend less time in anonymized spaces that aren’t conducive to healthy discussion and relationships and instead seek out each other in real life.

I support it because I want to see the Silicon Slopes destroyed and young people abandoning Utah.

The sponsors of this bill are likely less worried about the 17yr olds who can hack around the restrictions. They're more worried about 12 and 13yr olds who are attempting suicide and experiencing mental health crises at a rate that far exceeds any previous time.

The problem is the loss of privacy for all users. They will be forced to verify the identity of every user to do business in Utah, so you can either expect third parties like Stripe (with their Identity product) to get richer or an increase in leaks and hacks containing tons of driver's licenses.

I would be surprised if bugzilla.mozzila.org has over 5 million users

Ya would be awesome

You realize these companies will quiet-fire all employees residing in Utah and never hire there again? That this will place massive negative pressure on all software salaries in Utah? Possibly on all software salaries outside of deep blue states?

It’s a narrow win. If people can’t post to their sites, they’re going to start thinking about going to Colorado rather than Utah for their skiing. The so-called “Silicon slopes” are going to thin out as large companies question what the legislature is going to arbitrarily decide to screw with next. Tourism dollars and high tech jobs are a hefty price.

As an aside, I lived in Utah for many years and I generally thought people preferred to not have the government dictating what was allowed and not allowed.

Willing to bet most of the Utahns you lived around are more worried about the impact of these services on their kids than on government overreach. They can't figure out a non-governmental way to fix the issue.

> we don't have to be the bad guys taking it away

You not wanting to explain something to your kids and enforce limits based on said explanations isn't a reason to make a law.

Also, no Reddit, no Discord, no forums and no Hacker News.

Paradoxically, TikTok and Instagram could pass in a limited form. What is targeted is communication between people, mindless consumption is fine by that law.

But that's not what would happen:

> Utah has become the first US state to require social media firms get parental consent for children to use their apps and verify users are at least 18.

> The bills also impose a social media curfew that blocks children's access between 22:30 and 06:30, unless adjusted by their parents.

So there would very much be something you could do about it, and your kids would find out.

You're still the quote-unquote bad guys. You still have to, gasp, parent.

So kids are just going to replace all of that with more porn? Utah is already the biggest consumer of it

That is the goal. It's not a bluff. The kids are just an excuse.

That would be nice wouldn't it - mental health would improve so much.

There are plenty of people it would help. But there are likely quite a few it would really hurt, losing access to distant family or support.

It's only social networks at question. Direct messages to people would not be changed.

The solution is actually simpler than that. Just shut down any company operations in Utah, refuse to accept any payments from users with Utah addresses and require all of your employees that are located in Utah to relocate. But people in Utah can continue using the service.

It's also quite possible that this law gets thrown out as unconstitutional by the federal courts since it seems similar to the California video game censorship law from Brown v. EMA.

Remember the time Facebook blocked news in Australia?

Or be a company based outside the US. "Your laws, your problem: my government doesn't care"

> What do they do exactly, start collecting government IDs from us before every visit?

That’s the idea actually.

Submit thumb for verification.

I would say that anonymity on social media currently has a serious, real-world price to pay. Teen girls and Instagram don’t mix - the numbers reporting depression and suicidal thoughts since it took off is heartbreaking.

They made us wear masks due to a threat to our physical health. Social media is currently having extremely acute effects on the mental health of a generation. It may have reached the point that losing anonymity and requiring ID is better than suicides and depression. At this point, if you look at the numbers, it’s like claiming the government is infringing your rights to buy alcohol anonymously. We should stop pretending that mental health damage is of lower priority than physical health.

(And don’t get me started about the parents - outside of SV, only a few percent even know parental controls exist, let alone how to use them effectively without loopholes.)

Is anonymity the key issue for your example of Instagram and teen girls? I'd guess that a lot of the pressures come from their peers and professional users who are quite openly using their own identity.

Cyberstalkers use phony IDs. Consider the case of the mother who harassed her own daughter last year.

I would suggest that those cases are a minor issue and the major negative pressure comes from general interaction with peers (whose names they know) or comparing themselves and their lives to professional social media users (almost always openly using their name).

> I would say that anonymity on social media currently has a serious, real-world price to pay. Teen girls and Instagram don’t mix - the numbers reporting depression and suicidal thoughts since it took off is heartbreaking.

I wouldn't say that anonymity is the problem here, but rather that social media sites are crafted to abuse the psychology of their users for attention, engagement, ad impressions etc.

It isn't a given that social media has to make teens depressed. If the psychologists and researchers that are hired by these companies to hone in on engagement were instead were paid to make their platforms less psychologically harmful, we could see better results. Hell, platforms have the potential to improve people's lives if they were optimized for those outcomes. Civil and criminal liability could be introduced to social media operators to ensure that their products aren't causing harm, as well.

Incentives to achieve those results can come from legislation and the judicial system.

In my reply the poster, I did directly point out that we're using a mostly anonymous platform to discuss this issue. However, I agree with you.. it's about how the platform encourages or ignores bad outcomes.

> Teen girls and Instagram don’t mix - the numbers reporting depression and suicidal thoughts since it took off is heartbreaking.

This has been a claim for a long time. Esp with self esteem and teen mags or the beauty industry. Unfortunately, social media is the greatest prison people created for themself.

> losing anonymity and requiring ID is better than suicides and depression

Mr gjsman-1000, is this a reasonable claim? SM that advocates free discussion in a mostly anonymous forum [HN].. is that causing the issue that we're discussing? [My stance is engagement oriented industries are causing this at the benefit of profit]

> outside of SV, only a few percent even know parental controls exist, let alone how to use them effectively without loopholes.

This sounds like a great acknowledgement of a problem that can be fixed.

> Teen girls and Instagram don’t mix - the numbers reporting depression and suicidal thoughts since it took off is heartbreaking.

Funny how people care about youth suicide only when it is about making controlling laws they want.

Somehow, there is zero interest in teen girls as persons - all I see on HN is tons of contempt towards them, again and again. Somehow, boys suicides dont matter at all despite being higher. Somehow, boys mental health issues matter only when you can use it as talking point against feminists (boys are depressed? must be because girls are allowed to refuse the sex).

Stop pretending you heart is breaking.

You could say the same thing about cigarette and alcohol sales.

Those have been solved by requiring ID. Personally, I find online storage of my ID to be a lot less acceptable than a bored teenager giving it a 2 second glance while I'm picking up beer.

ID checks are far easier in person than over the internet.

Credit card.

Why not require an ID to own a smart phone? Seems far more realistic to set up regulation around smart phone ownership than to require businesses outside of your state to check IDs.

Which are illegal to minors.

> it puts the burden of enforcement on tech platforms rather than the kids' parents

What else do you expect? When tech companies make phones secure enough for the NSA, every app has passwords, and most apps have disappearing messages, how exactly do you expect parents to monitor what their kids are doing?

All the "parental monitoring" apps do is check how much time kids are using the phone. They give zero info on what the kids are actually doing.

So tell me, you want to put the onus on the parents? OK, then require any app used by kids to make all messages available to parents, and forbid disappearing messages.

You don't want to do that? Well, then don't say: "parents you watch them".

You can't simultaneously make something someone else's responsibility, and also make it impossible for them to do it.

I’m not really sure if I disagree with you, but in the past we’re parents really able to see everything their children were doing? Like telephones did not record conversations, they were effectively “disappearing messages”.

I guess the argument would be technology enables children to do secret stuff without any of the obvious signs, like sneaking out in the middle of the night?

Telephones did not record, but they did have a log of incoming and outgoing numbers. So it was possible to check if a child was suddenly talking to someone new.

> I guess the argument would be technology enables children to do secret stuff without any of the obvious signs, like sneaking out in the middle of the night?

Yes, it was rather obvious when a teen was behaving secretive, or there were middle of the night calls.

Privacy is important, but if your teen was suddenly displaying secretive behavior you could tell.

Of course they were not able to see everything kids do. They were not able to track kids movements via app either. Parents have huge amount of control that was impossible in the past now.

They also lost some control, if you lived in ideologically segregated community, kids had no way to learn about ideas from outside. That was destroyed by internet. Your Utah Mormon kid can read pre LBGT materials now.

You don't have to give your kids a phone...

This, I think it would far more realistic to ban the type of devices a child can purchase or own then push this burden to "social media companies" on the internet.

Yes you do. You can't live in the modern world without a phone.

Try it if you don't believe me. You can't even ride the bus without a phone because bus stops no longer display schedules and routes.

Want to go trampoline jumping? It's impossible without a phone because they want you to sign a waver in advance using your phone.

Pay Phones are no longer a thing. The "phone behind the counter" in restaurants and shops is no longer a thing.

Even grade school children are staring to have trouble navigating the world without a phone.

We got our six year old daughter an Apple Watch with cell service. I think that’s allowed her a lot of freedom since she can walk to her friends house without crazy people calling CPS on us (totally happened before). She just met another girl with the same watch and now they are best friends.

Okay? The bus stops near me growing up didn't have signs on them either. We just knew the timetable, or went and waited for it.

That's all fine for 12-year-olds but becomes absurd authoritarianism for high schoolers.

That is precisely the solution. Tech platforms are far more culpable than parents in this matter. If that means your startup idea no longer scales - good riddance.

> If that means your startup idea no longer scales - good riddance.

And if that means no startup can possibly compete against the existing players in the industry that have the bandwidth and resources to implement the regulation?

After reading this thread I realized that's exactly what people (in this thread) want.

They want "the old internet" back, whatever it means. Of course it means no more startup. Startups change things and we don't want that! We want the exact internet from 1998.

I don't know why they want the "old internet" in a thread talking about protecting children lol.

When I was 13 I was playing CS 1.6 on dedicated servers with a small number of strangers that were like 30, I was also on I don't even know how many random forums with small numbers of users.

It's like a 13 year old hanging out at some random adult's house vs walking around a mall.

I can't see how a bill limiting access to websites with more than 5M users is going to reduce paedophilia.

> And if that means no startup can possibly compete against the existing players in the industry that have the bandwidth and resources to implement the regulation?

I think starting a tech startup under a VC model is a high-risk, high-reward setup and that your idea should be strong enough to withstand regulations such as this, yeah. There has been a lot of false innovation lately and it has soured my view on the model.

I think it also hurts the incumbents, even though they get a moat of sorts. But only a moat around "tracking teenagers for advertising data".

Absurd objection. Tech platforms are obviously the only ones capable of moderating their users at an application level.

Should we remove content filters on YouTube and ask parents to filter content instead?

Just use BankID/GovID/whatever verified OAuth service and request a single age/date of birth data point once. No need to authenticate or store anything.

For exactly this reason, there is no way this law will stand in court

Utah's political system, and by virtue, judiciary, is run by LDS. Don't consider anything rational will necessarily prevail when powered by magical thinking.

A Utah resident connects to a server in California, controlled by a company in California. This seems like interstate commerce to me, and is thus regulated by federal law, not the laws of individual states.

Consider Wickard v. Filburn[0], in which the courts ruled that a farmer growing crops on his own land, to feed to his own animals, all within a single state, was participating in "interstate commerce". Given this extreme bias towards classifying everything as interstate commerce, I can't imagine that a Utah resident connecting to a California company wouldn't also interstate commerce. This isn't something Utah can regulate.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

Yup. Federal law enforcement uses interstate nexus via server locations to establish jurisdiction.

> A Utah resident connects to a server in California, controlled by a company in California. This seems like interstate commerce to me, and is thus regulated by federal law, not the laws of individual states.

Interstate commerce is generally subject to concurrent jurisdiction of the federal and state governments, except that state laws which discriminate against out-of-state trade are presumptively illegal, state law cannot negate federal law, and federal law can explicitly (and sometimes implicitly) forbid state regulation of the same conduct. It is not the case that the mere fact that it involves interstate commerce automatically, without federal law addressing the subject, precludes state regulation.

OTOH, to the extent that the elements of site design likely to be challenged under this are very closely related to the functions protected by Section 230, which does include a preemption clause, even if this is otherwise Constitutional applying it is going to often be tricky in practice.

I may be wrong, but I think it depends on whether it actually conflicts with any federal law. States can pass laws that affect interstate commerce if there's no superceding federal law and if they don't fall afoul of the Dormant Commerce Clause, which sort of generically restricts interstate protectionism.

So, for example, I could setup a server in Oregon, which responds to requests received from other servers in Oregon[0], and then suddenly I find myself in legal trouble in Florida? Why am I subject to Florida law when I live in Oregon, and I have no representation in the Florida legislature?

[0]: In this example, I connect to an Oregon ISP and respond to requests being relayed through this ISP, but I never directly connect to servers in other states. This is a reductionist view, and may be silly, but it helps make my point.

I think that goes to jurisdiction, which is a different issue.

The sibling comment by dragonwriter (which I missed somehow when posting) is a better-worded version of my point about interstate commerce.

Assuming they acknowledge this at all, more and more laws are being written and passed knowing full well they violate federal law and will be challenged. The intent is not regulation of society, it’s political visibility and winning “points” among your electorate. Whether the law stands scrutiny is irrelevant

Don't forget trying to tee things up for our extremist leaning SCOTUS bench.

Posts like yours only serve to vindicate this new law(bill?) in Utah.

Care to explain your statement?

In a fun twist, the data centers are quite possibly in Utah.

That said, assuredly Meta, Twitter, etc… have some kind of foot print in Utah

Meta has Eagle Mountain. It's ~ $3B CapEx + ? OpEx. If it means billion in losses, it would pull up stakes and move.

https://datacenters.atmeta.com/all-locations/#united-states

> This isn't something Utah can regulate.

The stream of commerce doctrine gets silly pretty quickly since literally everything has some degree of it.

I was convinced federal courts wouldn't allow states to collect sales tax on out-of-state purchases (or at least say states can't enforce it), that seems to be ok.

You are so smart! I suppose now I can start a gambling site for users in all states, in violation of state regulations, as long as the servers are hosted in a state with loose gambling laws. Can't believe other gambling sites weren't doing this!

The idea that nobody is entitled to privacy until they turn 18 is crazy. I shudder for all the LGBT kids whose parents all now have a (state enforced!) right to snoop on them.

(Honestly headline should be: “Utah bill gives parents full access to their children's online accounts, including posts and private messages”)

> that nobody is entitled to privacy until they turn 18 is crazy

But precedented, through the history of parenting.

Child abuse is precedented, doesn't make it okay.

Straw man.

The most likely parents to exercise a right to read their 16-year-old teenager's online messages would be abusive, controlling ones.

That's a further, unsubstantiated assumption of malice.

Some involved, worrying parents want to know their kids aren't getting mixed up with bad lifestyle habits or dangerous persons.

The American stance on children is different. Children are the property of their parents, to raise and indoctrinate however one sees fit.

Luckily everyone grows up and when you're 18 you can move to a Democrat state never entering a church ever again.

Why are LGBT youth for some reason the special subgroup of people against whom every concern about rights being tested against? More so than anyone else's rights? It's like they somehow occupy a privileged position in your mind that everyone has to watch out for this group. Why is that?

I’m gay, so it just hits more personally.

I'm not, but I wish it was known that I want to unify in the importance and right to privacy.

>against whom every concern about rights being tested against?

because they're often the first group these legislations aim at. It's no coincidence that the state in question is Utah, effectively run by the Mormon church with a strong interest in censoring youth access to the internet.

As a European my concern is actually for Muslim girls. Every year a few of them end up honour killed.

So no it's not just the gays who have to fear their parents.

> Why are LGBT youth for some reason the special subgroup of people against whom every concern about rights being tested against?

They aren’t.

But they are a group particularly targeted right now, and targeted by legislation, and targeted by the same religious-social-political faction pushing this legislation even if this particular piece of legislation doesn’t overtly target them, so…its reasonably to pay particular attention to how this legislation affects them.

Children are not entitled to autonomy - they do not have freedom of movement in general, freedom of employment etc...

Privacy, like any other form of autonomy, is in control of the parent and should be given out as part of the educational process.

18 perhaps is too old for the state to grant independence, but that's a problem in general and not restricted to privacy.

> Children are not entitled to autonomy

Counterpoint: Of coursw they are.

You should go read about children's rights ratified by pretty much every country on earth.

I recently saw a short video by Syria's Assad in which he argues that parents should be able to dictate their religious beliefs to their children, rather than allowing children to decide their religious beliefs on their own initiative.

It's somewhat less extreme than the old medieval feudal that the feudal lord should be able to dictate their religious beliefs to their serf population, but not really by much.

Freedom of choice with respect to religious beliefs, and legal bans on religious discrimination, are a fundamental necessity in any democratic system of government. Additionally, children do have the right to privacy, just as adults do.

>Utah bill gives parents full access to their children's online accounts, including posts and private messages

I see no problem with that.

Parents, as legal guardians, are legally liable for their childrens' actions. Parenting also necessitates having privileged knowledge of their childrens' circumstances and situations.

So no, I see no problem with parents having "full access to their children's online accounts". That is simply part of the duties and responsibilities as parents, and whether the parents exercise their authority is also their decision to make as they raise their children.

This makes abuse much worst. Also, this is about teenagers - 16-18 years old. Parent demanding full control is neither normal nor healthy nor something historically expected.

Teenagers are still minors and legally beholden to their parents or guardians. Parents should have full access to their childrens' circumstances because parenting occasionally requires such privileged information.

Whether parents would make full use of such authority is another story, of course. In most cases they probably won't, but the option to exercise must exist in order for parents to parent properly.

I think that this is simply not true. Actually, starting 16 parents dont have access to what was said in psychologist office anymore. Nor should they. Parents should not have full access to their teenage children diaries nor to all their communication.

> Whether parents would make full use of such authority is another story, of course

The most abusive parents would use that access.

"Entitled to privacy" from whom?

1. Corporations?

2. Educators?

3. Strangers?

4. Parents?

> (Honestly headline should be: “Utah bill gives parents full access to their children's online accounts, including posts and private messages”)

Cool, lets do that.

I witnessed and experienced the mental health crisis Tumblr caused. It's not worth it. Take all the kids off the internet. Save some lives.

It absolutely boggles my mind how this website can purport to be about hacker ethos, and yet every time a thread like this comes up you get tons of commenters talking about how they are going to tightly control which games and websites there kids have access to, what kind of devices they have access to, when they have access to them, etc.

Myself, I think like a lot of people on this website, grew up with basically unfettered access to the internet and computers. And that period of time today seems like a golden age of the Internet. Maybe you think the internet today is just so insidiously dangerous compared to them, but I think that's just naive. The internet had a lot of fucked up content when I was accessing it at that age too. Our kids are going to grow up thinking the time they used the internet as a teen was the golden age.

I'm not saying unfettered access is what you should do, but maybe imagine yourself in your kids shoes, only it was the 90s with home computers instead of the 2000s with apps and social media?

You may have great arguments about the net harm of social media or apps you don't happen to like, but they are not going to resonate with your kids if you approach it via "I know better then you." If you're on this forum, you are very capable of setting up home wifi that you can monitor. Why not see what's a problem for them first and address it then?

My parents and schools having an "I know better than you" attitude and blocking sites/access is how I learned how to bypass those restrictions in fairness. Within a year I knew more than they did about tech, and they could no longer block me without physically removing cables (good luck with that in a 5G-enabled world!)

They're just setting up the next generation of hacker!

I got my mom to disable parental controls so I could do hacking. I showed her that the programming websites I wanted to access were blocked and so were the IRC servers where programmers congregated. She decided she didn't want to hold back my education. I don't think the people who build these things really mentally model for children that do more than consume Disney.

Are you going to take the same stance with your kids and tobacco or alcohol? Why not see what's the problem for them first instead of pretending pretending we know better? Come on. Regulating social media exposure is somewhere between basic hygiene and diet control.

Hacker ethos? Hackers use the unbeaten path to solve problems. That's what a hacker is to me. Is a hacker for you someone against all forms of moderation?

> dangerous compared to them, but I think that's just naive. The internet had a lot of fucked up content when I was accessing it at that age too.

Same. However, my impression is that the focus here is on the volume of access not the type of content. We didn't carry the internet around in our pocket. Allowing us to use it on the bathroom, waiting for the bus, or even in class during a lecture.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

... a sentiment as impotent as it was naive.

This has, "If you write in your FB status that FB doesn't have permission to use your pictures as outlined in their ToS (which you already accepted) then they have to comply with your request," vibes.

There was a time when what Barlow wrote spoke to a lot of hackers out in the world. Maybe that's not how the world is today, sadly.

Gonna be honest, it’s kind of cringey. I don’t think the sentiment is disagreed with here, but the fact that it sounds like an overzealous dungeon master.

I'll give you honesty right back: back then, most of us either were overzealous dungeon masters or had one as a close friend.

This would ring a lot more true if we weren't talking about centralized websites that will enjoy the excuse to demand your government identity, adding to the surveillance databases that power their real business. And until tech culture moves on past this evolutionary dead end, governments will continue to think that the "Internet" is just another thing to be micro-regulated.

Generally I support parents taking action to protect their kids from the harms of social media; but coming from a state government, and this one in particular, it comes across as a bit draconian the approach being taken. The hidden agenda does seem to be keeping Mormon youth from encountering materials critical of LDS church truth claims. Too little too late, but I'm sure that's one intended consequence.

You might be experiencing cognitive dissonance

> The hidden agenda does seem to be keeping Mormon youth from encountering materials critical of LDS church truth claims.

This is a common claim of online commenters that seem to have no first hand experience with the LDS faith. There is no effort within the church to keep members from reading things critical of it. It's not anything anyone ever brings up.

In recent years there have been efforts related to the slight increase in membership withdrawal, but those efforts have been publishing books (Saints) and articles (Gospel Topics Essays) that directly confront some of these topics that those leaving the faith feel were kept from them.

This was a somewhat defensible opinion a couple decades ago, but it's pretty laughable today.

As much as I dislike social media sites and think there is sufficient evidence of their harm to teens, I don’t think these bills have any legs.

There are already people in law that are pushing back on the legality of this in regards to violating first amendment rights. [1]

1. https://techfreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TechFreed...

EDIT: pluralized bills, after realizing that there were two related bills regarding this.

So this is like... let's introduce these concepts at a certain age level ("think of the kids") to normalize control over a population, eventually expanding it to undesirables? This is dangerous. Just like the groomers thing. The best thing about the internet has been unadulterated, unrestricted access to information. Parents should be more involved with what their kids are seeing, but kids seeing anything (from neopets to al'queda beheadings) are what has created some seriously talented and informed people. We need outliers and deviants, not curfew-ed lambs.

They've had so much success with "groomers" in other states. They're trying to "protect" more young kids now.

"Restricting the firehose of content driving mass upticks in childhood suicide rates, obesity, porn usage, and mental health issues - this is dangerous!".

"Restricting the firehose of content driving mass upticks in Atheism - this is dangerous!".

Interesting analogy.

Have you ever tried to squeeze a firehose shut without turning off the water first?

> The bills also impose a social media curfew that blocks children's access between 22:30 and 06:30, unless adjusted by their parents.

The main bill is a possibly a bit overreaching but I’m fully in favour of this part. There’s a huge problem where I live with kids just not going to school and many of those same kids are staying up until 1am each night doom scrolling or watching YouTube.

Related, but my prediction is that by the end of the decade internet anonymity will be gone forever. Social will be the first place it falls with governments requiring SSO to a government run IdP that is verified by ID

I could get behind this prediction just because it feels like you could take literally any political affiliation and still end up pushing for it.

Libertarian? Privacy conscious liberal? First amendment conservative?

No.

End of anonymity and end of large scale unfiltered user-generated content. The internet is going to become like every other form of information media where a tiny group of people/companies is publishing and the rest of us are consuming, no questions asked.

It's not impossible, but that's a lot of tech for the fed to setup and they aren't the best at consumer level software. There's also the fact that many political players utilize the anonymity of the internet in their campaign tactics. Not to mention the possibility of connecting to a VPN to circumvent the requirement for using a US ID.

I think it's more likely to see intelligence agencies insist on more direct control over stopping "viral" spread of "disinformation", and to at least threaten to hold platforms responsible.

They'd probably outsource it. REAL ID by Meta or something horribly dystopian like that

this is a crappy headline.

by trying to put some age limit on things, they're forcing absolutely everyone to give up their identity to the government / sites.

And is that bad or something? If you want to use a harmful product (and make no mistake social apps are harmful), then being careful about who is using it is a good idea.

This law affects GitHub. You shouldn’t be able to upload code or submit a pull request anonymously?

GitHub knowing who you are does not prevent you from being anonymous to the rest of the world.

Unfortunately that is the most reliable form of age verification we have: government ID cards.

If this is 100% true in its face it would look identical to if it was a scheme to de-anonymize people.

And all of the security is in the physical card manufacturing itself. Uploading a photo of a card is trivial to photoshop and requires no hardware at all.

It's not hard to design age verification to avoid that. Briefly you have age verification done by sites that already have to have your identity or that you trust giving your ID to, and then provide a protocol that lets you use the verification from them with other sites.

With a little modern cryptography you can make this protocol so that the age verifier gets no information about what sites you are using the age verification with, and the other sites gets nothing that ties the identity used with the age verifier site to the identity you are at the other site.

Social Media use is probably worse than smoking for kids. Smoking gives you a 15% chance to get cancer in 50 years but instagram gives you a 66% chance of depression today.

It’s incredibly, empirically unhealthy and it should be banned for children.

Why let 18 year olds+ use it then? If it's that bad, it sounds more like crack, which we ban for everybody.

I’m in favor of autonomy for adults but yeah, that might be a better world.

I can respect that position. I tend to be very in favor of autonomy for older kids/adolescents because I think going from 0 to 100 and having them be 18 and fully responsible is going to result in bad decisions. Like we see with drinking, or if we gave kids driver's licenses at 18 with no education. They need a period of time when they have autonomy but also support and some people around them to veto things or else they can't learn to make good decisions.

Social media is toxic and addicting. Kids hardly stand a chance against it.

I get that SM can have lot of bad effects on people

But being controlled and micro-managed by your parents when you're at a stage to naturally seek independence and autonomy.... yeah, can't imagine how that would badly impact anyone of these kids. Like, at all.

How about instead empowering kids to learn about the science of tech addiction, or addiction in general, and the science of how SM effects people...and also teaching them the science of how to free ones self from addiction

Allen Carr's "Smart Phone Dumb Phone" might be a good option for instance

But micromanaging teens is the worst thing for them. We all learn from knowledge and understanding, not being controlled

In Australia lots of kids are already directly taught about the downsides of social media. My daughter is 16 and has had mandatory classes about it in school every year since she was 12. The problem is the kids don't give a shit and it's the parents that don't understand. This should be dealt with through education campaigns, but it's the parents who those campaigns should be targeted at. If somebody's parents group were going to gossip about them actively enabling their kid to get access to social media when we all clearly know the dangers of it then it would very quickly lead to a dramatic reduction in kids having access.

Is it possible that the nature of those classes about the health effects of social media aren't addressing the root?

Take for example abstinence only sex education. If its anything like that or gives off paternalistic vibes (don't do this cuz x, y, and z) then no surprises it isn't working

But on the other hand if you teach them about the possibilities of a real foundation of friendship, and vulnerability and transparency in a relationship can drastically be far more fulfilling, and also how to assess character and compatibility as well as understand the (possibly) ephemeral nature of infatuation, signs of abusive dynamics, how to protect one's self and boundaries/assertiveness, then perhaps thats a totaly different thing

You can't just teach them "Don't do X", you gotta show them how to live a much more interesting life than just doom scrolling

"Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom." -Baha'i Faith

In addition, "X has bad effects Y" does not address the root of why we might engage in an addiction. Often teens are under a lot of stress and pressure and those things are a coping mechanism. Teaching them mindfullness meditation can really help them a lot in terms of discovering the bliss of calmness and peacefullness

> How about instead empowering kids to learn about the science of tech addiction

What if we made selling tobacco legal to minors but continued to educate them on the health risks?

SM actually can have beneficial uses if done in moderation. Tobacco does not

And although restricting tobacco access from minors does reduce their usage, it doesn't eliminate it entirely and is not a replacement for empowering them with understanding of the world to make their own decisions

Can anyone familiar with the law tell us if this will stand? What grounds does the government have to limit access like this?

On an unrelated note, I’m a little surprised how positive people are on this. How many of us spent time online in forums or chat rooms as teens? That can be a very formative experience. Especially for kids who feel like they don’t fit in with the local crowd or feel unaccepted by their parents. I’m too old to get discord, but I can see that internet subculture is going strong there.

> How many of us spent time online in forums or chat rooms as teens?

As if this relates in any way to visual social media like Instagram and TikTok, the primary sources of teen discontent. Nerds buried on some internet forum or chat room can hardly be compared to what is clearly a rapidly deteriorating public health crisis brought on by the use of these applications.

I'm overjoyed for all of the parents in Utah right now. Legislators are looking at the data.

I think the toxicity and addictiveness of modern social media are a whole different ballgame from the forums and chat rooms of old. The forums we grew up with weren’t explicitly trying to maximize “engagement” by showing the most viral content and distorting perspectives of the world around us. The fact that most of the forums were anonymous meant that people could be honest if they wanted to, but also bred a healthy skepticism of what strangers were up to, I think.

And yet this bill will probably impact them in the same way.

The way to solve social media is to ban advertising. There, I said it.

Actual bill is here: https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/static/SB0152.html

For those wondering if it'll affect your site/service, this only applies to social media companies that have > 5m account holders.

5 million is not a lot, especially if you're just counting the number of users in your DB. Something like MAUs would be a better metric, but would still include things like Steam.

Laws can't and shouldn't substitute good parenting.

Laws of this kind only make it worse for everyone and teen who knows a bit will find ways to bypass them.

It's a bad slippery slope to even more government overreach in what was once, an avenue for democratisation of the conversation and freedom: the internet.

YouTube has content filtering for kids which parents could never mimic. App level moderation just cannot be achieved by a parent.

These social media companies have a direct relationship with their users, many of which are kids. They need to serve their child users appropriate content, and in an appropriate manner.

Furthermore, there is nothing in this bill that stops parents from parenting.

Guns don't kill people. People kill people. The only way to stop a bad 6-year-old with a gun is to have another good 6-year-old with a gun. ALL NONSENSE!

Yours and the other 2 comments are a descent into madness.

I don't know who you guys are arguing with. Seriously, it seems you're so much into US tribal politics that you simply kneejerk react.

It's insane.

> Laws can't and shouldn't substitute good parenting.

Right. Why did we make smoking illegal for kids? Should have just let the parents stop them.

Why did we make child labor illegal? That was just bad parenting allowing the kids to work the mines.

A good first step. Hopefully they can limit their parents' access next.

> "As leaders, and parents, we have a responsibility to protect our young people."

So why don’t you educate them?

I think it’s unlikely this law stands up to a court challenge, so we’ll see what’s actually limited

I really don't see the overall negativity towards this bill. Yes, there may be problems with id verification, but outside of that, is it such a big deal that a parent needs to give permission for their kid to start using Instagram?

My kids don't get to start using Disney+ or Netflix without my permission -- namely my credit card on the family account. This doesn't feel much different.

Do you think kids under 14 shouldn't have parents involved in guiding them online? I agree once they're older they need more freedom. But an 11 year old who wants to use TikTok because all his friends do or a 12 year old who wants to use Instagram or Snap because all her friends want to message in a group there should have some parental involvement. The amount of bullying, wealth-shaming (your house sucks), etc going on is mind-boggling.

And yeah, we used to have bullies when I was a kid too, but it would be on the schoolyard in front of 2 or 3 other kids, not a chat thread with half the school on it.

Isn't this similar to a law that Florida passed? That got overturned and I don't see how they could ever enforce this.

They will not be the last. There is a lot of political capital being spent in this area, both because it improves health outcomes for young people, and because whatever negative side effects might arise will largely be borne by California and the larger tech industry alone. Big Tech is not seen as an ally in many state capitals.

In the long run, this could be a boon for social media companies: they now have a requirement to ask you to identify yourself and provide clear proof of your location. This will drive away some users, but the remaining users will be great for targeting ads.

If only we could get states to increase the age of consent.

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

Sounds like they're incentivizing kids to learn about networking to get around this.

This is a strange way to legislate behavior. The fact that they're selectively cutting access to a population during a time period rather than limiting the overall negative reprocutions is a weird thing.

This is not the internet I want to participate in. It's freaking scary that the government is associating your ability to freely access information based on your class and standing. Why we have weak journalists and activists who aren't making a shitfit over it is just mind-boggling.

Subcomment: I do believe that social media has caused harm, however the negative reprocutions on how they're going about it does not seem like a good intention.

We as a society have decided you need an ID for alcohol, and ID for marijuana in the states where it is legal, and so forth. We know that social media can be just as habit-forming, addictive, and dangerous to mental health; especially among teenagers.

I see no reason why society should not extend ID requirements to certain times of night.

An important difference being the ID’s purpose being just to prove your age during for that transaction, not provide a mechanism to create a permanent record of your behavior.

Well, what is your plan? We can’t pretend that letting teen suicide jump 29%, and having 1 in 5 teens now having severe depression, is an issue that parents should be solely responsible for solving. And we shouldn’t pretend yet another social program could be as effective as slowing down the source.

That would be for Utah to solve. At a minimum, Utah should be providing the infrastructure for its people to be able to obtain a digital ID that has an API for websites to use which legally cannot have its history recorded.

I have strong support for the provisions that require certain features be built into social media sites themselves (e.g. "sites must support curfew scheduling" or "sites cannot have free reign on targeted advertisements") as it gives controls people want but currently can't easily get from most of these types of apps.

At the same time I'm not really a fan of the implementation being based on providing real identity for a hard age cutoff. Maybe I'm 20 years old and don't want my real identity to be tied to the social identity for privacy/coming out/political/other reasons as personal info uploaded seems to always get leaked. Maybe I'm 17 years old and having the same restrictions as a 7 year old that will disappear instantly in 3 months doesn't make any sense and I never had good chances to learn to make good choices on my own accord while I had the strongest support structures I'll have all my life available. Maybe I'm worried this is part of a slippery slope for all, as the ages keep rising on this type of legislation over time.

Overall I'd much rather put the tools (like curfew support or removal of targeted advertisements) in the hands of people and argue why they should want to use them. Similarly, with the tools made available, I'd rather trust parents are able to learn to raise their kid on this matter as they have every other matter so if kids are found to be working around curfews set by parents we don't need the government to step in. If one argues too many parents can't then I'm sorry to say you've done a horrible job convincing anyone what you think is good is actually so and relying on unpopular law creates more problems than it solves.

Alternatively I'd at least like a solution where the associated age verification identification is unrelated to your real identity (e.g. a one time proof at the DMV when you're getting your first 18+ license that gives you some identity token which identifies you as 18+ but does nothing else and is not stored or mapped with your real identity otherwise). It doesn't solve a lot of the blind application problems (and still lacks guarantee limitations you want to follow you into adulthood, if you so choose, can) but at least it prevents one class of issues.

It may sound like I fit in the small government camp for everything but I'd say I'm fine with government getting involved with what corporations can do a lot more often than when people are involved. Overall it also depends on the issue and the alternative outcomes with implementation. I guess what I'm saying is don't generalize because I argue for small government here I also argue for it in every case all the time, even if it is about people. There are some things I think it's great to centrally legislate but content consumption is one I don't think the benefits outweigh the costs on. It's certainly the most direct and probably has the largest impact but "we've waited so long to do anything about it that the problem to become really big" is a horrible reason to pick direct and largest impact approaches.

This was a long read, but I'm glad you wrote it out.

I too am in full support of zero trust tokens. However, I feel like society doesn't understand and would never support this. Corporations have no punishment for collecting and abusing people's information, that it's disgusting. Even when they're caught abusing it, theres no negative repercussions for the organizations. (Experian.. which should have been completely closed.. got a minor fine to continue leaking people's info)

Another point I wanted to make for you. I want to see anonymous identity tokens as that we're continuing on this path. For example: Hetzner is now requiring biometrics + id proof of who you are to pay them money for a server. I understand they want to avoid fraud and provide services to legitimate people, but that kind of info is insane to give to some random person at some corporation.

If you have an intelligent problem solving governance:

1. Acknowledge the problem

2. Seek a root cause

3. Attempt to mediate this issue at it's root. My uninformed, and unasked for, opinion on this is this is due to the adjustment of living situation and social expectations of that age group pushes their developing social environment to go global rather than staying local. (People are scared of their kids in the local community hanging out and social, where they've been stuck in doors playing xbox/tiktok).

4. In doing #4 attempt to mediate this issue with the parents. Don't try to punish people in the situation, provide acceptable alternatives to help people be better.

On a surface level:

1. Demonstrate in public a way that live without social media is a workable thing for people at that age

2. Provide mental health outreach for the effected people (This costs money so it's never done)

Large numbers of states actively monitor (via swiping IDs) your alcohol purchase history. Many states have entire bureaus whose job it is to keep this information.

Interesting, I did not know that, and that is disappointing to find out.

I believe that Utah is one of those places who do that. (I can't find a resource that they do, but it's too similar to the patronscan tech that near by states endorse). That's one of the things that turned me away from enjoying that state.

From what I did find, they are required to keep that info for at least 7 days. As a Chicagoian, required tracking of how much and where I drink at is super concerning.

https://www.abc4.com/news/top-stories/why-is-the-bouncer-sca...

Age is not a class

I assume by default the true motive behind this is surveilling and outing gay and lgbt youth, thought-policing and suppressing progressive political speech and activism. I don't trust the motives of any red state in this regard.

You’re downvoted; but this is the obvious result. Mormons in the state don’t want their kids learning about sex or have good sex or find out all the contradictions in their holy book and they don’t want to find out that what their parents are doing is serious and scary manipulation and abuse and so banning their access to the internet is a way to protect the families and “protect” the children.

I think you and the parent comment are off base. I have no concrete evidence of that, but in a very blue Massachusetts, most parents I know begrudgingly allow their children on social media, and only to the extent required to prevent their children from being social outcasts. Social media has very real negative consequences for a lot of kids (and adults). I don’t think this is a red team/blue team game.

I agree. The stated reason is easily enough to explain the action. Tons of parents are concerned about this everywhere and would probably love such restrictions (if enacted by the networks instead of the state).

I'm no longer a practicing Mormon, and I understand where you're coming from, but that's not what's happening here. They'd be banning wider swaths of the internet if they were trying to keep kids from learning about sex or church history. This is a more generalized "protect the children from the world" instinct.

I would rather argue it is again easier to treat the symptoms rather than address underlying issues - regulate the toxic platforms. Similarly like smoking, the please don't smoke signs and over counter sales have not really helped until advertisement was largely prohibited/limited.

That was the first thing I thought of, personally. The internet is how I came to learn what transgender identity was in the thick of the Bush era, when you could not talk about these things with anyone in person. In many parts of the country, that hasn't changed since then, or it's even gotten worse. The internet helped me put into context a lot of things I simply couldn't talk about with mom and dad, or even god forbid, let them find out it was something I even wanted to talk about.

This wasn't mentioned in the debate over the bill (only it being marketed as some "common sense" bipartisan initiative), but I strongly suspect it benefited from the culture war over queer kids, and they will be disproportionately harmed by this.

One thing worth mentioning is that it only affects platforms with >5M users, and many of the resources I used back then were garage-run websites with much fewer users. I'm kind of mixed on this because I do believe major platforms are better equipped to handle abuse reports than rinky-dink forums. But on the flip side, said rinky-dink forums weren't constantly manipulating you for attention.

Teenagers need access to social activity and information outside of their parent's view to form their own identity and ideas. This is very healthy and natural. I understand social media is having a negative impact on teenage mental health, but so is having your parents listen in on every conversation.

This bill is draconian BS. Goodbye anonymity. "For the children" is always used to pass the worst crap. This bill doesn't do anything to help children, it only increases power for power-tripping parents by making it so that their kids have no privacy, even as teenagers. Imagine being an LGBT teen in Utah right now.

If they really cared about mental health, there's so many things they could do... but instead, they did... whatever this is. This is the same state that wants to ban pornography on mobile devices "for the children", so excuse me if I don't trust their motives one whit.

This law might might make sense if it simply disallowed children to view algorithmically curated feeds.

Most of the harm from FB, TikTok, etc stems from a non-chronological algorithmic “amplification”.

Otherwise this is clearly 1st amendment bait.

How is it 1st amendment bait?

Interaction on a public forum may be construed as speech.

> How is it 1st amendment bait?

Because it restricts speech and association, on both sides (provider and user.) While minors’ rights in this area are somewhat attenuated, they are not null, and while commercial entities have rights which are attenuated in different ways than minors, the fact that it the regulation is explicitly content based (in that the exceptions are content-based) means the first amendment is more relevant than in the average commercial regulation.

(Depending on how the 5,000,000 user cutoff was reached, it might also have Commerce Clause issues; if its a selectively measure that imposes costs and favors in-state entities by only targeting at a scope that no in-state entity otherwise within its coverage has reached, that looks a lot like a prohibited discrimination against out-of-state business.)

How do they tell if a user is under eighteen?

Clearly teenagers are smart enough to select an age over 18.

The governor's tweet is: https://twitter.com/GovCox/status/1639015949964840960

> SB152 requires social media companies to verify that users in the state are 18 or older to open an account. Minors will need parental consent to create an account.

Ok, so what age verification does SB152 require? https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/static/SB0152.html

> 246 (3) (a) Beginning March 1, 2024, a social media company shall verify the age of an > 247 existing or new Utah account holder and, if the existing or new account holder is a minor, > 248 confirm that a minor has consent as required under Subsection (1):

They totally punt on the issue of how you determine if an account is a minor:

> 256 (4) In accordance with Title 63G, Chapter 3, Utah Administrative Rulemaking Act, the > 257 division, with consideration of stakeholder input, shall make rules to: > 258 (a) establish processes or means by which a social media company may meet the age > 259 verification requirements of this chapter; > 260 (b) establish acceptable forms or methods of identification, which may not be limited > 261 to a valid identification card issued by a government entity; > 262 (c) establish requirements for providing confirmation of the receipt of any information > 263 provided by a person seeking to verify age under this chapter;

It is not remotely clear how you are supposed to enforce this without requiring government id for all users. Or at least, Utah users.

There are already laws on the books in numerous states requiring porn sites to verify that users are over 18. As far as I know, none of them require users to upload a government ID. As usual I think HN is making leaps of logic without actually reading the law or thinking of how else users might be verified (A $0.10 refundable credit card charge for example).

To my knowledge no porn site requires anything beyond clicking "yes, I'm 18," which is the exact kind of "how old are you?" mechanism easily circumvented by teenagers. A credit card charge is not exactly less burdensome than providing state ID.

They don’t. They will require everyone to provide an ID when signing up.

Not just signup. The language of the bill says it applies to existing Utah account holders as well.

The context of "authoritarian theocracy is the first to do X" really helps highlight how bad of an idea it is. No social policy that Utah's government does first is a good idea.

Next, they should limit boomer social media access.

And then everyone in between.

"...Meta said it has robust tools to keep children safe."

Sure.

Watching the socials get lumped into the same moral category as cigarettes, domestic abuse, the Sacklers, and cable news, is giving me a bit of schadenfreude.

Don't worry. My joy won't last.

> Next, they should limit boomer social media access.

Yeah, target the one group who consistently shows up to vote…

Very weird feeling I have here, in China. For once, I feel it's the americans following us. What's next, limiting online video game time ??

Limiting the platforms of celebrities and influencers?

Oh no, that'd be limiting Freedom Speeches™.

But the US Constitution doesn't guarantee anyone will be listening.

We are talking about banning china owned TikTok in the USA, which would be like banning US owned Facebook in china. So ya, maybe you have a point?

I feel like it is a universally constant thing for some subset of people to want their government to “force those other people to do what I think they should be doing”.

The only the US does relatively well is to provide mechanisms to reverse course when these things happen. Which is also why a lot of changes end up in gridlock.

Which I suspect will happen soon in this case.

I'd guess it's more of a "make sure our children grow up into healthy working adults, instead of more minimum wage tech addicts".

When I was a teenager my screen time was the maximum feasible. Now my average screentime is between 12 and 14 hours a day. I'm yet another gainfully employed software engineer.

I don't think there is any empirical evidence correlating tech addiction to income, but if there was I wouldn't be surprised if the relationship was positive.

Who is going to make them grow up a particular way?

For me this is a public health measure. If video games were shown to have a similarly destructive effect on our youth I'd consider regulating that too.

That would also be good. I know people who have shit their pants during RuneScape sessions. They can’t use it responsibly.

I find what Facebook has done to a non-negligible portion of boomers to be a morbid & highly interesting phenomenon.

Its always crazy to me how proponents and opponents never address each other’s points. They just talk past each other saying their own completely unrelated points.

A: “But what about kids in abusive households that get cut off from communication”

B: “We have tools to ensure kids safety that requires actively using our social network already”

that’s a frustrating way of having a conversation

You're assuming they're trying to have a conversation...

It annoys me that they are presented as opposites, people segregate themselves as if they are opposites, imagine the other side is opposite, and then when you actually look at the stances they aren't opposite at all and probably actually reconcilable

but yes, “opposing” is more accurate than opposite. people just seem to only have the mental capacity for two opposites

The Democrats have their own flaws certainly, but I’m having such a hard time finding a consistent ideology among conservatives. Free speech absolutism, mixed with parent choice, no choice for women, censorship for some kinds of speech, anti-regulation limited government but strong regulation of tech products. I just can’t square any of this.

What do you need a "consistent ideology" for? These things seem to be what the majority of people in those states want (for better or worse).

Your cognitive dissonance comes from thinking this is a monolithic party platform thing.

This is a Utah thing, with burgeoning consensus in a couple other states.

That’s just humanity in a nutshell. I’d be more worried if everybody had the same views.

Look, I’ll take a risk here and speak my thoughts, assuming you genuinely want to learn more about Republicans in 2023.

It’s confusing because they aren’t unified. I was a Democrat until 2015, when it felt like both sides had lost their mind and I voted libertarian. It seemed like there was no place for free speech advocates in the Democrat party anymore.

Eventually, my wife and I decided to become officially Republican when we realized that the Libertarians were totally ineffective as a party (the libertarian convention is literally just an excuse to have orgies and do drugs) and couldn’t fight back against the progressive ideology that we see as harmful towards successful child rearing, as well as us retaining a principled moral stance for free speech against the primarily leftist ideologies that had become so pervasive in social media circles. We feel like Elon Musk purchasing Twitter was one of the most important positive events of 2022, and a huge win for free speech.

There’s a lot of weird transition going on in the Republican Party because of this new group of “former Democrat refugees” who tend to be libertarian and free speech supporters are trying to integrate with the old guard republicans. We roll our eyes at this kind of stuff, but figure “it’s better than the crazy stuff going on these days on the other side”. Republican is turning into a much wider tent.

Speaking as someone who more or less went down the same road as you have politically, this is spot on.

I don't know if there's a term for this fallacy, but I see it happening all the time. You're trying to break the world down to us-vs-them where "us" is a single narrowly defined group and "them" is everyone outside that group. In this case you're incorrectly grouping together classical liberals, neocons, Christian/Jewish/Islamic fundamentalists, Laissez-faire neoliberals, and paleoconservatives. Then being confused why they all disagree on different issues.

> I’m having such a hard time finding a consistent ideology among conservatives

I'm having a hard time figuring out why you would expect to find one. The people who "vote conservative" do so for numerous different sorts of reasons, conservationism is not their root ideology, it is downstream of other disparate ideologies. A conservative voter who is Mormon has different motivations than a conservative voter who is a secular small business owner, and both have a different root ideology from an old school Catholic or an anti-communist Cuban-American.

Knowing this as I'm sure you do, why would you expect "conservatism", aka "voting for republicans", to be a consistent ideology? The people who do so were never all coming from the same ideological position in the first place.

Btw, the group of people who vote for democratic candidates also do so for a wide array of reasons, and don't all share much of a common and consistent ideology either. Welcome to the two-party system, in which innumerable ideologies get pigeonholed into two bins.

What a joke every teenager knows how to cloak themselves with a VPN to evade parental access restrictions & new tech will emerge to thwart all these laws! Google builds infra to make sure your kids have 24/7 access to YouTube! I know I used to work there! The only restriction we could impose at our house was to turn off the router at midnight!

I freaking HATE google / YouTube for filling my kids' childhoods with Smosh videos instead of real books or high quality active play.

And yes my son flunked out of college because of online social media - twice! He's got ADHD which makes him a perfect target for the addiction phd psychologists employed at social media and videogame companies! For these online tech vampire companies addicting your kids is like shooting fish in a barrel! And yes I'm a cs phd who got my start in network security!

As a left-wing free speech parent STILL STRUGGLING against online addiction with a 21-year old son who is STILL spending 24/7 to waste time online I'd put the threat up there with : hard drugs & gambling addiction. Yes it's that severe for a not trivial part of the population. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Will the app ask, “Are you over 21?” YES - NO

No, qualifying social media sites will need to see ID. The bill specifically mentions driver's license, passport, or birth certificate. Although this is a "think of the children" style law, all adults would also be affected.

Papers please. Want to speak and assemble online? I'm gonna need to see some papers first.

Seems appropriate to bring up the gross the age of consent issues in the US...

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

I applaud the law. I personally have children and want my children to be able to manoeuvre through adolescence, development, and puberty without the barrage of garbage the world throws at them.

The law allows parents to open up everything and give full access if that’s what they decide is best for their children. No freedoms are removed.

The world existed before the internet. Let kids be kids. I personally would rather have my children playing outside, running through creeks barefoot, learning to interact with people face to face than have them develop so many of the destructive behaviours that can develop through un monitored internet access. Many here are assuming it’s an all or nothing approach to internet usage which really isn’t the case. The spirit of the law is to limit the facebooks and the TikTok’s that have been shown to be one of the influences on increased suicide rates among youth.

> without the barrage of garbage the world throws at them.

Surveillance, for-profit mythomania, and predatory consumerist garbage... as well as other types of predation.

I feel like banning outlets for self expression is going to be even worse for teen mental health than the status quo.

This is yet another instance of "Think of the children":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

I feel like a lot of discussion has already the color of Utah's politics even before discussing the objective aspects of this issue. Would HN have the same reaction if this was a law passed in California or EU?

Keep saying it. Whatever China does is ridiculed and laughed at only to be quietly adapted into Western democracies 10 years later. But we get to vote on it so that makes it better I guess?

First of all, this law isn't going anywhere. Second, I was in China ten years ago and their internet was absolute garbage. Any site not on the approved list was blocked or throttled. I had to use a VPN the entire time. China does some thing well, but its internet policies are absolute trash.

I am...very surprised by some of the discussion here. Maybe I'm just not that familiar with the harms of social media as someone who chooses not to use it. But support for anynomity and free access to information was always part of what I interpreted as the 'hacker ethos'.

It's been odd to see this pushback against social media transform into actual legislation for a flat out ban. Not forcing social media companies to end the use of tracking and dark patterns mind you, a flat our ban. It seems like admitting that humans just can't have unfettered access to each other's lives on a global scale. We can't stand to talk and exchange controversial opinions and see each other's best highlights without falling into toxicity, envy, and tribalism, nihilism and depression.

I don't like that thought, it doesn't bode well for our species.

I can't imagine what my childhood would have been like if I wasn't able to break out of the box my parents and society out me in and really reach out to conversations and ideas that many people would find dangerous. I don't think its an exaggeration to say I probably would have killed myself. And I mean that in a very real way. Society doesn't tend to be very kind to people like me. I realized I was a MAP from a young age and grew up thinking no matter what I did I was going to be a monster. I can't imagine what it would be like not to have anyone to talk to about that. Being at such a vulnerable age and not finding anyone who would listen.

The other commenters are right, this law is going to harm marginalized groups in Utah. Replacing the parents and preventing children from freely exchanging ideas isn't going to fix the core negative incentives that make these platforms addictive and toxic. Nor is it going to address the societal changes that would reduce people's dependence of social media. It's not going to make kids suddenly go outside and meet one another again. Maybe I'm wrong, I mean I hope I am, but I doubt it.

God I remember how much it sucked being a kid. Getting treated as property of my parents, as if they knew what was best for me when they couldn't even take care of them selves. All that unfiltered internet access led me to a successful InfoSec career, it led to an escape from my shit-hole life.

But my biggest concern is the possibility of stifling online anonymity through some aged verification system. A second-order effect that basically chills free speech without directly legislating on it. I'd hate for my kid to inherit a world like that, a world where they have to supply an ID to comment on Hacker News.

It seems like something worth fighting against. It makes me feel like being violent.

As a parent, this isn't something for the state to mandate. I feel they took the choice away from me.

If my child breaks one of these vague laws, who gets brought to court?

The parents.

This is smart for the times and perhaps useless in the future. I wonder what is the level of support amongst parents and teens in Utah.

What is the difference between tobaco and social media? What are the similarities between tobaco and social media in the brain?

For one I won’t end up with emphysema, lung cancer, mouth cancer, whatever nor can I pass off the negative affects to other people around me by proximity.

Isn't this against the first amendment?

The Governor promised, “there will be lawsuits”.

HN commiserating kids killing themselves due to social media last week

HN complaining about a state doing something about it this week

I wish this was the case in all 50 states. Kids' minds need to develop without screen addiction.

Europe might help here with getting around the privacy issues.

Organize your social media company so that all of the posts are made through, stored, retrieved, and controlled by a European company and all the processing/storage occurs in Europe.

GDPR would then apply to the European company. Yes, it would still apply even when the data is about someone who is not European. GPDR's extraterritorial rules are that it applies (1) to companies not in Europe that are offering products or services to people "in the Union" or tracking the actions of people in the Union that take place in the Union, and (2) to companies in the Union regardless of where they operate or where the data subjects are.

The CLOUD Act in the US would not apply, because the data would be controlled by a European company. The CLOUD Act applies to the case where a US company is storing data in a non-US location but still under its control, and allows the US to order that US company to retrieve the data.

It should be fine if the European company is partly or even completely owned by a US company, just as long as it is set up so that the European company controls the data. GDPR would still apply because of the European company, and the CLOUD Act would still not apply because the US company would not control the data.

If the US government had control of an app in China or Russia used by tens of millions of impressionable young people do any of you really think they would not take advantage of that to tip the scales and slowly affect political opinions and other outcomes?

How is that relevant to the Utah declaration?

Sure, let's blame social media for the troubles of our youth.

It's not the endless wars.

It's not the endless poverty.

It's not the endless divisiveness.

It's not the endless media fearmongering of X or Y.

It's TikTok. It's Instagram. Etc.

Good points. But 3 and 4 are partly caused by social media I think.

They did it plenty before social media. That just accelerated the spread of individual stories.

Mass media did it from the start, but was less effective because they were trying to create "one size fits all" narratives that could reach and influence very large portions of the population. Recommendation engines tuned to the individual changed the game dramatically. They can lead people down rabbit holes that the other people in their life don't even know to exist. At least when the town newspaper or local church starts shilling some truly wacky shit, everybody in town knows about it. But now youtube/etc personalized recommendation engines can send your brother or father down radicalization paths you never even heard of before and had no possible way of noticing before the damage was done.

If you think "Oh I'll just watch youtube to get an idea of what other people are watching", you're stuck in 20th century thinking. It doesn't work like that anymore, youtube/etc are fundamentally unlike old media. These systems have atomized society in a way that newspapers never could.

They existed prior and yes have been elevated since SM. Not necessarily because of SM, but because SM can take the blame while those who drive the wedge get a free pass.

As a parent, restricting social media is one of the most effective tools I think we have to promote well being. The things you mentioned are also problematic but I can limit social media access and when I do my kids are better off.

My point is, blaming SM and only SM is a (false) oversimplification. There are systematic societal issues getting a free pass because of our collective willingness to buy into a distraction that the cause is SM.

Just because adults have normalized the baggage of negativity and lack of progress doesn't mean the kids aren't feeling beyond the lies. FFS, any reasonable adult should be feeling pain and distraught at this point.

p.s. I forgot to mention climate change / environmental damage. Imagine being young and thinking "someday this shit-show will be mine." It's foolish and naive to blame SM for this.

I agree SM isn't the only issue.

But I also don't think my teenagers are nearly as concerned about climate change and the world they are inheriting as they are living up to the life social media says they should have and feeling inadequate being unable to attain it.

Is this a bit like "what about all the other cancers?!" in a discussion about breast cancer? It's not as though this prevents action/attention for poverty or other issues. It's one tack of many, whether you agree or not with the plan itself.

We’ve always had endless wars, endless poverty, endless divisiveness, endless media fearmongering, etc. Those things have all been much worse in the past than they are today (maybe not the media fearmongering). But youth (and adults too) weren’t exposed to it every waking minute of their day the way they are today.

Endless wars...

The children of North America have by in large not experienced war themselves in well over a century, with cartel violence being the standout counterexample of sorts. More lost parents to wars, but the Vietnam War was now a few generations ago and the "wars on terror" effected only tens thousands of North American families in this way, counting all casualties not just fatalities. Tens of thousands sounds like a lot but this country has hundreds of millions of people, so you can hardly explain broad social trends with this.

So how else might wars be effecting children in North America? Well for one, children may become depressed after watching tons of graphic foreign war footage online... on social media.....

First they came for the trade unionists...

The People's Republic of Utah.

Land of the free or something

Good. I really wish we changed the “privacy age” from 13 to 18.

Something has to be done. It is too close to alcohol and tobacco. Makes you feel good but causes some yet to be diagnosed disorder.

Agreed. I'm unsure whether this is the right approach, it should be the parents' duty to monitor what their children are doing and limit access appropriately but it's been clear that many of them simply can't be bothered to do so. Someone has to step in eventually.

As a tech pioneer and also an otherwise liberal person, I welcome this move. The company called Meta is doing extreme damage to society and needs to be stopped at all costs.

> needs to be stopped at all costs.

I can think of a few prices I wouldn't be willing to pay. This bill is one of them.

Wait till you have kids who get their lives destroyed by Meta products.

While I am admittedly not a parent, I promise you that my approach to parenting would be to parent my children and not every child in the state.

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