The case for banning children from social media
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It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff - especially in our highly polarised political climate. The right will immediately target "wokeness", and the left will immediately target "hate speech". And the kids will be totally forgotten about.
That's why I think, don't bother trying to regulate social media. Just ban it for under 18s when they're most vulnerable.
I don't relish this solution either. When I was 13, I was on forums making online friends. I loved it. But it was clearly different back then, before smartphones, before content-creators, when the internet was mostly nerds.
(I don't use social media, but I do use YouTube. I was amazed how quickly, after watching one fitness video, it immediately started showing videos of the most ripped, steroid-abusing bodybuilders, and how I could achieve their "amazing" physiques. Then videos started popping up about all types of performance-enhancing drugs. SARMs, trenbolone - it was crazy how quickly it devolved to this)
It's not hard. It just upsets vested interests.
Make it illegal to show ads to kids. You don't have to make "kid" identification airtight, because few people of any age want to opt into ads. The ad industry was very upset when the American Psychological Association proposed this back in 2004.[1]
This doesn't raise constitutional issues because ads are considered commerce rather than speech.
And besides, banning ads will not prevent social media from trying to lock minors in, either to already have them when they turn 18, or to benefit from peer network effects to rope in more of the 18+ audience.
> It's not hard. It just upsets vested interests.
Vested interests are precisely why it is hard.
Yeah, this is what makes regulating anything hard or pointless, if the "vested interests" are powerful enough.
But on top of all of that... what is an "ad"? Is it an "influencer" who is getting paid to promote a product but doesn't actually disclose that? Which already violates FTC regulations, and we aren't even managing to enforce the regulations we've already got, cause this is pervasive.
How do you define what is considered an ad here? How is age verified online? What if I have Hulu on TV from my account while my kids is in the room? Are other forms of ads banned as well, like cable TV commercials or billboards? Cereal boxes only use cartoon mascots to advertise to children...so also illegal?
> I don't relish this solution either. When I was 13, I was on forums making online friends. I loved it. But it was clearly different back then, before smartphones, before content-creators, when the internet was mostly nerds.
The main difference between forums like that (which still exist) and social media is monetization, which leads to optimizing for "engagement" and incentivizing addictive behavior.
So IMO the solution would be to ban corporate/for-profit social media.
Advertising to kids is obviously a big part of the problem. But it's not the ONLY problem with social media – it's just one piece of a much bigger puzzle.
https://diysolarforum.com comes to mind, Will runs a related informational site and YouTube channel. I don't know if he technically made a business for it but he could have, and if it continued to grow there could be good reason to hire a few employees.
I think the real difference between social media and forums is the algorithmic feed. We could likely codify a ban on algorithmic feeds of user generated content. That would go a long way and would be much easier to spell out in a law than a targeted ban on advertising, social media use by age, or certain types of business models.
Today, that means teaching kids how to cope with social media. It is in their world. It’s not going away. As a parent, I can understand the temptation to just want to ban it. I wish I could ban a lot of things I would rather my kids not have to deal with. But parenting just doesn’t work like that. They need to learn to deal with it, and it’s my job to try my best to help them do that.
Actually, we protect children from lots of things that they will need to confront as adults. My baby will need to learn how to safely navigate stairs eventually, but for now, the staircase is gated so she doesn't hurt herself before she's ready.
And as this comment explains[1], social media is hurting our children in real and profound ways.
Snakes are part of the world, but you teach your kids that you don't let snakes into your house because they are toxic. You can apply the same analogy to social media.
You make social media inaccessible to your kids until they have developed into a confident young adult at which point they will have acquired the mental strength to navigate through the toxicity of social media themselves with a strong self identity which will make them immune to a lot of the online grift and attempts to feed off their insecurities.
Banning multi-billion dollar companies in a society dealing with regulatory capture, or help teach kids to deal with the world around them. One sure seems more easily attained than the other.
A big part of going through teenage years is the development of one's own personality and finding YOUR OWN identity. Figuring out who you are and who you want to be, building real relationships with real people to learn about social contracts, trust, bonds, friendships, mistakes, and most importantly it is a key part of building a healthy amount of confidence and self-love which are important character traits that everyone should establish to some level in order to weather through tough times in life later on.
Social media makes all of the above impossible. Even worse, it makes this important development phase very toxic. It teaches teenagers and children the opposite of friendships, the algorithm is constantly looking to outrage children and to rattle their feelings in order to drive engagement. The algorithm is tuned to feed into young people's insecurities in order to drive clicks on ads and increase their ad revenue. This is why so many kids suffer from mental health issues, are immensely under confident, unhappy, feel alone and worthless.
It's shameful that policy makers are not acting fast enough. There is already a huge generation of damaged children who just turned or are turning into adults now and we already see the effects of that.
I suspect heroin has led to considerably more felony convictions and fatal overdoses than any social media platform.
YouTube needs an option to disable shorts. It’s just not healthy.
TikTok I won’t even touch it. It’s virtualized crack.
I have disabled them along with suggestions with a browser extension, but the temp station is always there to enable again even briefly. Shorts are particularly addictive and must play hell with our dopamine receptors.
Ok. Now, how do we counter this very same argument against tv and video games?
Children don't really watch TV (anecdotally). They watch YouTube, which is just as bad.
The key difference between television and video games of yore is the feedback loop. TV and video games were one shot deployed and then ratings were gathered after, averaging across the entire audience.
Now YT and video games don't have end states - same thing as social media. While you often won't have individual-centric recommendation algorithms in a video game, you have dark patterns and gambling mechanics in all the most popular games which is just as bad.
The argument really isn't that we need to ban children from social media, we need to guard their dopaminergic regulation the way we guard their physical and mental health... oh wait.
Ultimately its the responsibility of the parent (at least in the US). Parents who are aware of the pitfalls of high-dopamine-low-effort activities, poor diet, and low physical activity are going to guard against these things. The ones who don't will likely suffer later in life.
I don't have Google auth cookies on my primary browser and every Google property has cookie autodeletion when the last tab is closed. Every time I start YouTube fresh, I get a new profile that I have to mold back to the content I prefer. On a fresh window I'm constantly bombarded with superficial crap I never click on. I'm also perplexed by the amount of T&A clickbait that gets offered in the shorts specifically. I have to spend time clicking animal videos to steer that to something less obnoxious.
It seems like a pattern, grown ups just don’t like the way youngsters are spending their time.
Maybe it’s totally normal in your teens to just spend aimlessly time in seemingly useless things ?
Soccer and basketball exist today. I don’t think you’ll find many parents who struggle with their kids’ habits with them relative to current video games like roblox. (Super Mario Kart doesn’t have the same addictive and predatory aspects)
Find a random parent and you’ll see for yourself. It’s not that parents are frustrated that their kids are playing too many video games. It’s that they are concerned their kids are becoming addicted before they turn 10.
One has tangible benefits to your health, social life, boosts your confidence, gets you out in the fresh air and sun, and forms healthy lifestyle habits.
The other has you sitting staring at a screen for (sometimes as many as 10) hours per day, pretending to be an Italian plumber, or giving themselves depression from looking at fake lives on Instagram.
Thing is, people of all ages are using social media. Grownups recognize it as dangerous to themselves too.
I really think this is less of a rock and roll situation and more of a tobacco situation.
Biologically there’s just no comparison to the dopamine bath your brain takes when using social media or video games.
> Like so many parents these days, my wife and I have ceded
So the parents are to blame here. "Ceded" to what exactly? To your kids unsupervised wishes? Most of the inadequate and harmful use of these addictive social networks is done at home, so, it's your jurisdiction, not the government's. Teach your kid how to use tech early on. Even if imperfect, put digital guard-rails and time limits and be on top of it at all times with discernment, commentary and openness.
> L.G.B.T.Q. child living in a household with disapproving parents might have fewer resources to find community and support because their parents would be able to look into their messages
Good argument. But, again, the disapproving parents are to blame here, not the kids. Educate the parents while giving children more channels and more people to talk to, so they don't need to go into dark digital alleys seeking relief.
You can blame polarization, the Chinese (TikTok), advertising, the Government or free-speech, but raising kids is a full-time job parents, not Uncle Sam, are supposed to do.
I'm learning it the hard way -- it's not easy being a parent of two, but the rewards are good when you are loving, persistent and listen to their needs. Trust me, if you put in the time and effort, your kids will beat addictive algorithms any time of day.
You can set a time limit on particular paths to reach social media, but as I saw with trying to block youtube, it is effectively impossible without blocking it at router level for the whole household. Kids are so creative, and nothing is more fun than subverting digital locks.
I do agree to the point that talking and listening to your kid is key. Kids that don’t feel comfortable showing vulnerability to their parents are at risk in the digital world.
The older I get, the more astounded I am at the fact that nobody in my family has social media brain rot. Or political brainworms. My grandparent's generation is mostly dead, sadly, but there are 3 living generations ranging in age from 0 to 78 and dozens of people and we're all fine. This is regardless of educational level (ranging from HS dropouts to MDs), political affiliation (everything from center Dem to anarchists, socialists, and even some Christian conservatism for spice), or religion. If I had to pinpoint the difference, it's that we were all raised by and surrounded by adults that understood the interaction between technology and daily life. But most people becoming parents don't have that, the Internet just crashed into their life and upended a lot of what they thought they knew without leaving anything in its place.
I also question that it's solely based on the parents because the older I get (I'm in my mid 30s), the more I think access to non-parental adults with this ability is the key to our relative stability, particularly tech-knowledgable adults that openly disagree with each other. Kids do stupid shit, especially when they're adolescents. They will disobey their parents/ignore their advice because it's part of growing up and figuring out their own values and boundaries, but when an entire group of adults who don't agree on politics, religion, or worldview all agree that something is a bad idea, then that idea becomes a cultural taboo. I don't think my paternal cousins and I have ever voted for the same things and I'm the weirdo gay heretic socialist to their traditional Catholic, but both I and my cousins are going to agree on the important of things like basic op-sec and when to tell people what online. So even if their kids rebel hard, the rebellious adults are going to reaffirm 'don't put your hand on the stove/do things like delete metadata from photos'.
I don't know if there's enough cultural knowledge communicated to the parents for them to parent effectively even though I agree that's their job.
If you go back far enough. I think in part we see forums through rose-tinted glasses. Moderation was looser than people are accustomed to now, and I've seen several taken over by conspiracy nuts. Some still make friends online almost the exact same way, using discord or whatever. I've been a part of communities, but never made "friends" online. The idea is a farce to me.
I was an "always-online" teenager. That was a mistake, but I didn't know then, Neither did parents. Just as no one knew that frequently watching pornography could lead to problems. Internet access and culture led to a brave new world.
You can pin certain issues more specifically to modern social media (e.g. endless scroll), but it's deeper than that. Most of what is identified as addicting content is an extension of what existed before, but with a far larger pool people accessing it.
At any rate - banning is redundant. Parents are apparently receptive to to the idea that it could pose a problem, to a neurotic level for some. This is a new idea. Let them do their jobs.
Unless you reach a stage where you meet up in real life and share human experiences, you're basically just talking with the equivalent of an AI chatbot.
The idea of banning people from seeking things they want to do to themselves is incredibly stupid with the "War on Drugs" and it's equally stupid here with all the same consequences: a sudden explosion of either unregulated social media alternatives (back in the day Napster had a chat function even), or suspiciously immature "18 year olds" on Facebook and Tiktok.
The number of comments here that haven’t realized that any regulations would require huge privacy intrusions for everyone is weird to see.
It’s like people are imaging some magical set of rules that would only apply to kids but wouldn’t impact themselves negatively.
People love to say that the war on drugs didn't work, but I for one haven't consumed illegal drugs even though I have been curious at times. Since I haven't spent time with people who regularly break the law I have not been introduced to any element where I could have had access to illegal drugs. So war on drugs has worked at least on me and I live under to illusion that I am somehow unique.
Yes. Of course addicts will addict. If we ban social medias tomorrow some people will still use them or build new ones, but putting any kind of barrier for entry does have an effect. This is why we complain when something is opt-out instead of opt-in since people do the default thing and if default thing is that social medias are illegal then that will deter many if not even most people from using them.
But part of the danger is the ubiquity of it I think. Every teenager has social media, so there's this massive peer-pressure. If you don't have it, you get picked on. I wonder if banning it would reduce the numbers at least enough to reduce this effect.
I'm definitely not saying this is some silver bullet... But I think we have to do something, and maybe this is a reasonable starting point.
I think it's the human factor. People aren't going to empathize with an avatar or 3D model the same way they do with a real person filming themselves with a smartphone. It makes me think that the real bar for extreme content in video games is having a politically opinionated theme, not just subtext (which no AAA studio would ever risk producing) with sufficient realism.
And while it is not clear how we are going to regulate them, or more generally deal with the negative effects, it is something we must figure out, a blanket ban is not the solution. You have to realize that even sites like Stack Overflow can be considered social media.
They certainly have addiction potential, maybe not dissimilar to drugs, but guess what, even some hard drugs like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine are not banned, they are regulated, because they have some use in medicine. Sugar is addictive too, and as of now, a serious health problem, but no one talks about banning sugar of course, instead calling for regulation.
If I were to ban social media for my children, I would ban specific sites like Facebook, Instagram, etc. I wouldn't ban niche forums.
It does seem like a reasonable solution. A rewind back to the age when it had been just the newsgroups. Without +1 algorithms that result in the algorithm making a choice what users see and not the opposite.
Certainly a better solution, if compared to forcing everyone to show their Real Id, just to verify their age to access the Internet.
I don’t want to say IRC was fine but it was better than Instagram.
Also, the effects on undeveloped brains are far greater. Our job is to teach kids and raise them. Not be their friends and just let them do whatever adults do.
Also, we give adults the freedom to fuck themselves up to a great extent that probably most people think it would be unethical with children.
I highly doubt the implied semantics of this statement. We don't know everything there is to know about "dopaminergic effects". The pharmacology of smoking weed is probably very different than from say, scrolling through memes.
Also, they shouldn't be able to launder responsibility for editorial choices by saying "an algorithm did it!" and hiding behind laws meant to protect email and IM providers and web hosting companies and ISPs and such.
I expect that combo'd fix a lot of problems.
This isn't as easy as it sounds at first.
I submit that this is not unlike drugs (incl. alcohol), or even golf.
But how on earth do we start a political movement around it? Difficulty: needs a 10-second blurb that does not rely on the word "algorithm".
"See what you want to see, not what's being pushed at you" is the best I can come up with.
This is greatly exaggerated, if not outright false:
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2023/04/addicted-to-social...
Which is not to say social media isn't harmful, but let's refrain from imputing pseudoscientific explanations for the dangers.
I'm not sure how realistic it would be to enforce ban on social media under a certain age. The ban would have to be enforced on social media companies but they'd likely only be held to doing a best effort solution. They already set a minimum age at 13 for creating a social media account but that hasn't stopped kids from getting into TikTok, Instagram, etc
Legislation would benefit children who were born to parents who do not understand the risks.
A good start would be to ban feeds based on algorithms; instead your feed would be a chronological list of new posts from channels you've chosen to follow.
The replacement you've described for an algorithm is still an algorithm.
Whenever you start talking about banning a specific group, your efforts are wasted because who decides the group. Someone at the top, and can they always be trusted to decide that? No.
If you need to talk about banning something outright, that's a far more approachable argument that doesn't add to the noise.
Also, it is known that the brain continues to develop after 18, there isn't some magic switch at 18 that says these people aren't still vulnerable.
Addiction and exploitation continue to happen regularly after that age, just look at gaming in general how many people are now in their 40s and spend more than 10 hours a week on gaming?
Some people are more equipped than others to deal with addiction than others, what that difference is between success outcomes and others should be promoted and studied.
Any system that can amplify or de-amplify a message runs into these problems. Its not just social media. Its algorithms too, and they are designed to exploit you and your psychology to get what they want which is profit or control in one way or another. That's what the humans who built these algorithms optimized for.
That said, I've been contending with this situation having a 14 year old of my own at this point. The reality is, at that time, swatting was not a thing. Pictures on the Internet were like, something a minority of people had, because it involved taking a film picture and scanning it in (assuming you had access to a scanner). Video? Forget it.
Honestly I wouldn't have blamed my own parents for being more restrictive with me had they known how to, but the tech went entirely over their head. Seeing how far it's come in that time and just how much more damage can be VERY rapidly done, particularly with the more developed blackmail scams, or just kids making poor choices that result in some very real criminal charges, have me pretty okay with taking a much heavier hand on the matter than was taken with myself.
I suppose I'd liken it to "free range children" in farmland, vs. free range children in a gangland ghetto. While we can certainly lament the lack of a good environment for kids to run free, the alternative is an unsafe environment. Perhaps platforms can be made to bring back a corralled in space that would be sensible, but allowing them loose on what the modern Internet has turned into would be frankly irresponsible.
That all said, there's only so much we can do at the legislative level. Kids are already not allowed on many sites they get onto (now, just the same as back then). What I find most necessary as a parent is the ability to lock down devices so that I can allow my child access to specific resources without being forced into allowing access to others. iPhones are frankly AWFUL at this -- I'm happy to report my experience on Android has been much smoother, and Windows is quite a bit better than my initial expectations as well (though router-level configuration is handy for home devices as well). IF we must use the heavy hand of government to address the matter, requiring the availability of usable, effective parental control measures that engage in app-level (if not hardware level in the case of cameras) whitelisting would be where I think we'd have the most bang for our buck without too much in the way of collateral damage. Better still would be some market pressure, but unfortunately, most parents I talk to seem to just feel entirely helpless and don't even know what to look for, and just assume there's no choice but to let their kids get raised by the Internet.
If you're new to raising kids in this era, do yourself and your kid a favor -- familiarize yourself with tools available, and demand platforms that give you the ability to effectively administrate your devices.
Its anecdotal for sure (maybe I just got lucky? maybe I had more sense than the average kid? maybe the shift is US/Western Nation localised?), but I don't think the internet has gotten worse everywhere at once.
I am sure they will turn out just fine after being released from constant surveillance and prison only after 18.
I'm sorry, this sentence doesn't explain to me why banning social media is necessary. What are "dopaminergic" effects? Why is it so awful that social media is addictive?
I don't disagree, but how do you propose we do that exactly?
The best you can do is try to explain and contextualise everything your kid might be seeing, which is very hard to do.
Also, not all parents are engaged with their kids as well as they should be. Having bad parents doesn't mean you're not worth protecting.
> Or ban having sex without the use of contraceptives if you are so keen on banning.
I'm not sure what that means.
Social media is a punishment for those to stupid to avoid it.
Huge win for helicopter parents
Either by taxing it so much that they have to, or by explicitly requiring payment. I'm not sure how you'd define "social media" vs say, HN (or is HN social media?).
Taxing advertising revenue at a higher rate could also do it (hmm, thinking about this, this might solve a lot more problems too).
For countries that don't do credit cards, there are other means - usually through the telco that provides mobile access.
Anyway - making users pay for it would associate the account with a credit card, and kids would have to do the same thing they do with mobile games and other paid-for stuff online - negotiate with their parents to get access. At least their parents would be aware.
It may work at first, but it will devolve into a stratified system of people who can afford it, and those who can't.
You might get farther instead of banning children from social media, ban all ads to children on social media.
Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,000 fine.
If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site.
Pihole via DoH plus uBlock has changed the internet so much for me, I literally can’t stand using other people’s devices. Let’s not even talk about watching TV, going to a sports bar is downright shocking.
As you said, it will never happen, but I too would be pleased if it did.
I'm pretty sure ads paid for the vast majority of useful websites that have ever existed, including sites like youtube which just wouldn't exist without them.
I tend to think a vast proportion of the freely available information on the web would not have existed without ads and that information was worth the trade off of ads.
Nobody has ever come up with a funding model for websites that actually works better than ads.
Not going to happen in the U.S. What is possible though, is banning billboards. See Maine, Vermont, Hawaii, and Alaska. Billboards are visual pollution, and blanket bans (as opposed to content bans) are constitutional.
Say we create a "this is a child" header, which would be sent with all HTTP requests and would mandate that the user not be tracked or advertised to. Great solution, except that everybody would immediately switch the header on because everybody hates ads. In effect, everybody wants to be a child.
So now online services fight back and say "okay, well, TikTok is only for adults anyway, you must be 18 to use it, so if this header is present, you can't use TikTok." So adults turn the header back off, and kids go back to lying about being 18.
Except for this to have teeth, we have to say that "a user's promise that they are an adult is insufficient to avoid the fine." So now we waltz into the realm of porn sites in the 1990s or Truth Social today: enter a valid credit card number to prove that you are an adult, or maybe take a photo of yourself holding your driver's license and submit it to TikTok for approval. Ick.
Okay, so let's go further. Let's say that there's a Government Identity office that, when you turn 18, grants you an Adult Citizen ID# security key that lets you verify your identity digitally. That has the upside of solving a bunch of identity problems. You could imagine using it for voting, banking, signing contracts digitally, proving eligibility to work and citizenship. But also lets you verify to websites that you're an adult. Downside: easier than ever for governments and everybody else to reliably track you and cross-reference you between databases. Less great.
But also, I'm not going to choose to "prove I'm an adult" to most of the Internet, just the sites I want to use. Proving I'm an adult is the same as telling them exactly who I am. Ain't no way I want to do that. Ads on random websites are dead. Google's dead overnight unless they require that I log in just to use it (which presumably they would, and I don't care for that at all). Now using the Internet in incognito mode becomes practically impossible.
YouTube has a lot of product placement. Is Mark Rober going to get fined if I show my kids his videos? On the other hand, Ryan and Blippi become illegal. Actually, I'm suddenly 100% on board with this.
There's really no reason a non-SSN identification number couldn't be used for this. If SSNs weren't sensitive, you could just have a government endpoint that takes an SSN tells you whether the holder is over 18 (or "no, or the SSN is not valid).
The only challenge is knowing whether the number belongs the the person sitting in front of the computer. There's no way to stop a kid from using their parent's number. Which is sort of the whole problem with SSNs in the first place: their value largely comes from the fact that they're secret-ish. In effect, they're passwords.
Except for purchases and other business or government type interactions I flat out refuse to do this. I simply do not use web sites or services that require a real name. I only rarely use ones that require an email.
Yes, this means I don't use most commercial services and major websites. I honestly think I'm better off for it. But it's also a line in the sand and I feel much better for observing it.
HN doesn't require an email to sign up. If it did, I almost certainly would never have created an account here.
One has to realise that for social media their networks effects are both their biggest strengths and their biggest weaknesses. Unlike for things like gaming or porn where there is a relatively large problem (i.e. 20%) if you manage to block only 80% of illegitimate access, for social media if suddenly 80% of the network disappears, than the incentive for the remaining 20% to keep coming drastically decreases.
Absolutely not. Where do you think 18 year old users will come from? They will come from 17 year old users who turn 18. Therefore, social media sites will still have an incentive to corral kids onto the platform. Because they will one day turn 18 (or 16, or whatever the legislated age cutoff is) and become a source of revenue. Moreover, social media sites want network effects and want to be trendy among young people, even if these things don't directly lead to revenue.
This would be almost impossible to enforce.
- Record a social media site advertising to a user who is under XX years old. Complain to a portal.
- Fine $1000 x complaint received each month.
- Continue to do so until the service's accounts satisfy some sort of auditing standard.
Come on, we do this for all kinds of things like credit card information and other data certifications.
The only way to make it more effective I feel is ID verification but then you are looking at collecting IDs from kids and that is a total non-starter in my opinion, not to mention they don't usually have a verifiable ID yet.
I don't have the solution, but if we look at other age prohibited activities they are usually restricted up until the age that you are considered an adult and as such ID is more reasonable to ask for.
I’m baffled by all of these HN posts from people who seemingly forgot what being a kid is like. Kids are experts at circumventing the rules.
All of these suggestions about fining companies any time a kid manages to use the website are DOA. Kids will use the internet and steal their parents accounts, IDs, and credit cards. The harder you lock it down, the more terrible the internet is going to become for anyone trying to use it.
Meanwhile, every social website will just pick up and relocate to a country with sane laws overnight.
The trustworthy part is going to be difficult though. It works in Europe for adults, but US folks seem to be allergic to the idea.
Nah. The marginal cost of a cigarette is tiny compared to the lifetime revenue of an addict. The marginal cost of a some GBs is even lower than that of a cigarette, and the lifetime revenue of a social media addict is enormous.
TikTok doesn't even have that many ads.
And weirdly - TikTok ads are generally decent - they are short, to the point, kind of authentic, not creepy. It's actually something they've done well.
> Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,000 fine.
> If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site.
Do you really want to live in a world where every website forces you to log in and verify your state-issued ID?
I think some people see the words “social media” and assume it only applies to sites they don’t use, so they don’t care how unreasonable the demands are.
Yet everything from HN to Reddit to YouTube is a social media platform. Do you really want to go through the process of ID verification for every single site you sign up for? Put everything behind a paywall so the website can confirm you’re an adult?
It’s weird to see how quickly HN likes to jump to extreme government regulation of online spaces these days.
"Social Media" is a really specific term and it doesnt mean any random forum.
No that doesn't affect how I feel it about it at all.
I raised two daughters whose lives overlapped with the existence of social media, but who were well into their teens before everyone and their dog started using it. When they were young we asked our family to abstain from uploading pictures of them to the Internet because we wanted them to decide how much online presence they wanted for themselves when they were old enough.
I do sympathize with parents today, who have to deal with the fact that "all the other kids" are on SM and even some misguided teachers will undoubtedly ask that certain assignments be completed that require the use of SM.
But I still think this is 100% a matter for private households. Despite the fact that I would feel for my children if we subjected them to the "FOMO" of not being on SM, and despite the fact that I'm sure they'd find a way to get around our decrees if they really wanted to, it's just not the government (or anyone else's) place to parent my children for me and so people can (and should) do what they think is best for themselves and their families but can also fuck right the hell off if they want to impose any sort of parental decision on me with respects to media consumption or use of technology.
If you do think some things are off the table regardless of the parent's opinion, where is that line drawn? (again, I'm not judging, just trying to understand your point better)
Lol. The "national conversation" you experience in a typical social media thread is a lot of name calling and implying that your political opponents are fascists, pedophiles, or both. SnR is extremely low even for minor, local political issues.
Political discussion on social media is a pure entertainment product.
The bulk of the evidence points to smartphones and social media as the primary cause. Specifically, the combination of smartphones video/image based social media causes kids to spend way less social time in person, and to make way more unfavorable social comparisons. Heavy social media use is unambiguously correlated with depression and anxiety. And the studies on causation all show that social media causes mental health issues, not the other way around [2]
Between 2003 and 2019 (pre-covid) the amount of time teens spend in person with friends dropped on average from ~144 minutes per day to ~41 minutes per day. How could that not have major health effects? [3]. The only plausible explanation for that drop at that time is smartphones.
There are major freedom of speech issues with this sort of regulation. And there are major technical and policy complications to actually implementing a ban. But the evidence is that social media is a public health crisis comparable to opioids. There is a real tradeoff that needs to be made between unlimited access to digital media and public health.
Lots of people on HN have a strong reaction against any attempt to regulate the internet. And there have been generations of moral panics about new technologies. But the available evidence show that this time is actually different, and we do need to have a real conversation about whether the health effects on teens are worth it.
[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, Figure 4
No. That is absolutely not why and betrays precisely the lack of understanding about these things that causes such a response to begin with. Any time you find yourself dismissing widely held concerns you should take a step back and reevaluate if you haven't missed something. Perhaps your life experiences or priorities are different than these people who you encountered who had a "strong reaction"?
At least for myself, the primary reasons for such concerns are the frequency with which new regulations have historically resulted in dysfunction and abuse, proved entirely ineffective at solving the stated problem, or both.
> There are major freedom of speech issues, and there are lots of other technical and policy complications
Right here you acknowledge something which should be cause for very serious concern.
Also I think I'd object to your framing of "a public health crisis comparable to opioids". Much of that appears to be attributable to the side effects of the "war on drugs". At absolute minimum the vast majority of overdoses are clearly due to unreliable product quality which is simply not an issue for things purchased legally.
So really I'd like to avoid a second "war on drugs" type scenario that seeks to solve a social ill via government intervention, ultimately fails and makes the problem far worse in the process, creates various bureaucratic machinations that are incentivized to ensure future funding for themselves rather than outcomes that are actually beneficial to the general public, and erodes civil liberties in the process.
That's reasonable a reasonable complaint about how I talked about moral panics. Updated the wording to not say that's the reason for HN's strong reaction. Though I really do think that cultural history is a major factor.
> Also I think I'd object to your framing of "a public health crisis comparable to opioids". Much of that appears to be attributable to the side effects of the "war on drugs". At absolute minimum the vast majority of overdoses are clearly due to unreliable product quality which is simply not an issue for things purchased legally.
I really don't think this is true. The government didn't cause a generation of people to become addicted to Oxytocin. You can argue about the best way to help, and lots of municipalities are trying harm reduction programs, but I don't think you can pin people ODing on fentanyl on the government.
Smoking regulations worked. CFC regulations worked. Automobile safety regulations worked. Sanitary standard regulation worked. Mandatory vaccine campaigns worked. Food and drug safety regulations worked. The clean air act and clean water act mostly worked. Government intervention often goes wrong, but it also often leads to huge increases in well-being. Particularly for addictive things presented to minors.
I wonder if this is a huge part of it.
Instead of only having to measure up to your local friend group, who are more likely than not to be close to you in living standards and upbringing, you have to measure up to people all around the world - and most of what’s posted on social media is carefully framed and selected, making things seem better than they are; you can’t even blame them for this as people who post are incentivise to do so to increase their chances to get noticed.
One could argue that traditional mass media has already made that a thing. But I feel traditional celebrities have an air of alien-ness to them, they are like Greek gods on Olympus, such that people are less likely to compare themselves to them or at least not do so as seriously.
Social media celebrities on the other hand often present themselves as the guy/gal next door. Someone you feel you can be friends with. The fact that they might even directly reply to you via social media further reinforces that perception. All this ratchet up the pressure to measure up and when you fail to, you feel bad.
I say that not to minimize at all... if anything I'm more shocked by this steep rise in younger children.
I wouldn't take this as seriously as you do. Self reporting this doesn't mean a whole lot, especially in a culture (among teens) where it's common, and a source of clout even, to assign labels like "trauma" "depression" and "disorder" to things that are not that.
As a parent, I was looking forward to an article discussing reasons for banning children from social media.
What are the philosophical implications? Mental health? Psychosocial?
Rather, it seems the article begged that particular question and then discussed legal obstacles and consequences instead.
Not the journalist's fault. Misleading headlines are the curse of our age.
I still would love to read an in-depth exploration of the topic of banning children from social media.
Utah passes laws restricting children's access to social media: The implications and civil liberties concerns
It isn't. Not if you want to serve the whole world, or even very much of the world. And not if you don't want to create a panopticon where everything anybody does is associated with everything else that person does, and nothing is ever, ever anonymous.
There are a bunch of sleazy "age verification" companies out there claiming they can do it. They can't, but they've spent years lobbying governments all over the world to get it required.
All "ban children from X" ideas are non-starters because the damage from creating the ability to know who was a child would greatly exceed any possible benefit. Assuming there was any benefit to begin with.
I have a strong feeling this will be the future of internet.
GNU Taler figured out a way to verify age without revealing your identity.
It's not "reasonable" to demand any effort that won't be effective. Period.
> GNU Taler figured out a way to verify age without revealing your identity.
Well, no. GNU Taler proposed a very complicated system on top of some zero knowledge concepts that have been around since the late 1990s, embedded in the rest of Taler's incredibly complicated overall system. That sort of gross impracticality, generally in the service of authoritarian goals that aren't good ideas to begin with, is how Taler rolls, and why Taler has even less chance of ever getting anywhere than cryptocurrency in general.
But it's true that zero knowledge systems can in theory solve most of the problem: whoever's certifying age doesn't know what the user is doing with the credential, and the relying party doesn't know who the user is.
... and that still has no practical impact at all. You can do all kinds of things in zero knowledge, if you have the infrastructure for it. But to make AV ubiquitous, you first have to make that infrastructure ubiquitous.
In practice, that will probably only happen if every government in the world starts issuing zero-knowledge credentials; only governments have the reach and the generally accepted standing to do that kind of thing. But governments in general have never shown any sign of having any enthusiasm for zero knowledge, in part because they tend to like having somebody's identity attached to everything that happens. At most you might be able to drag governments, kicking and screaming, into adopting systems where only they can invade your privacy. But probably not, because they don't trust one another.
There is, of course, a possibility of a private system developing, or of governments getting off their butts. There's even a possibility of Taler's grandiose dreams of massively complicated interacting systems of public and private institutions coming to pass. However, we don't have any of those now, and even if there were the will to make them work, it'd take decades to make them ubiquitous enough.
So people who want to advocate for age verification need to first go off and do about 50 years of work to build that infrastructure, before they can start talking about requiring AV for anything.
In reality, of course, the intent of all real AV advocates is to totally ignore that possibility and rely on "trust me" assurances from AV vendors.
However, even within their close circle of friends, I see the same social issues (peer pressure, need for validation, etc.).
I and many others were bullied relentlessly at school through regular non technological means, and I'm sure it had a pretty negative psychological impact. I'm not really convinced it would be any worse if I was more active on Instagram/TikTok/whatever.
[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...
Did Photoshopped images of you hanging from a ceiling fan with a Nike Swoosh and a caption saying "Just Do it" get 10,000 likes?
IMO bullying today is orders of magnitude worse than it was ~15 years ago.
As op asks, what even is social media? Does email count? An email based mailing list? A federated group chat protocol like Matrix?
Speaking of federated protocols. Email, Matrix, Activity Pub, many others are federated and self hostable. How is legislation supposed to account for that without causing more problems than it seeks to solve?
On that note, are the downstream negative effects of such legislation even being considered? If one of the outcomes is "provide copy of your passport to register a user account" would that not be a situation rife for abuse, both by governments and corporations alike? Is this a "cure" for which the combined side effects are worse than the original problem?
We can't outright ban social media (for a lot of different reasons), but we can regulate away the most harmfull aspects.
One of the fundemental underlying problems is the lack of good privacy laws. As long as companies can gather whatever they want and use it against us to show us personalized ads and posts to hold on to our attention as long as possible, we will not be able to curb the worst aspects of social media.
I'm trying to be pragmatic when I propose to curb the use of algorithm driven feeds and limit businesses to gather massive amounts of highly personal data thats is used to train algorithms to become even more effective attention grabbers.
There has to be limits to what a government can regulate or ban. Being social online should not be banned. Allowing companies to inject themselfs and interfere in our social interactions, gather almost unlimited data and use it to exploit our psychological quirks and weaknesses should be.
EDIT: And I agree that for the user, the ads are not the main problem. However, ads are the main incentive for businesses to do whatever they can to grab your attention, and this is a big problem.
Generally speaking, the law is quite clear: Ads specifically target towards children is illegal. Ads than are meant for grown ups, but is likely to be seen by children also has to adhere to certain limits.
I have to say I'm really happy with these laws. The same goes for the law that prohibits ads for alcohol containing beverages.
In addition, the parents must be provided with access to all of the children's messages and posts.
This now means that Facebook has to implement some sort of "are you 18" thing. Don't know how they'll implement that, reminds me of a recent law around porn in Alabama. Requiring a driver's license or some such.
It also means Facebook has to implement a back door of sorts for parents to watch their children. As of the parent of a girl who will soon reach social media age, this seems a bit much to me.
But the technical side of my brain screams, how on Earth are they going to implement this and keep spammers from abusing it.
It changes so many things. Child predators pretending to be 14. Indeed, any kind of anonymity has been largely banned because I have to know how old you are to let you on my site.
And it's not just Facebook it's any sort of social media, including our host.
- You essentially have to check some sort of ID and ban VPNs, banning online privacy which is BAD
- The smartest kids are way more tech-savvy than the dumbest adults, so you may end up banning adults too, which is BAD
- What will you do to children who get caught? Jail them? Call their parents, teachers, etc. who may not care? Make them take a "social media rehabilitation" classes? Consider that no matter the penalty, many, many kids will try very hard to work around this, and many parents will actively support them.
Something which would actually work is "banning" children like we ban them from seeing Rated R games and movies. Like:
- Banning children from specific social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). This can be done through laws or just activism and lobbying to pressure the sites into banning children themselves
- Encouraging parents to ban children from social media, teaching them how. You cannot call CPS on parents whose children are using social media, unless you think having many, many kids in foster care is a worthy sacrifice
- Creating stronger parental controls (which is also a part of 1 and 2: individual sites can create stronger controls like ID to ban children, and stronger parental controls will help parents)
- Simply discouraging children from using social media, maybe even with incentives
This is already the case, few will deal with the hurdles of COPPA, so most services require you to be 13 to sign up, and the platform has a general requirement to ban anyone they see that lied about their age.
(I've known two friends that had a Google account at 11/12 and got banned because they said "im 12" in comments; twitter also had a IIRC 2 year period where, if you changed your DOB and it reveals that you signed up when you were <13, your twitter account was suspended, and they only fixed this by requiring you delete tweets made when you were under 13)
With this shit, if you don't do it too you are out of the group and goodbye social life.
Social media are preying on the group-belonging instincts of kids with tremendous damage not only on the kids themselves, but on society as a whole.
However, it's up to parents to deal with it. It's unacceptable that I have to produce my ID on the internet to remedy the damage of other people poor parenting.
"But the cost!", well, if the business model can't be viable when done safely, then the business model is not viable - we just don't have the externalized costs of harm done visible to help make that call
Maybe we could start by finding some effective means for addressing our affordable housing issues.
Last I checked, the US was also the only developed country that lacked a national maternity leave policy. I'm not sure if I really want such, but it suggests there's lots of relatively low-hanging fruit for improving our policies with regards to being family friendly.
Sure, better age / times restriction tools (especially ones that unify over all device types) would help. But in the end the kids can just get their own devices and a mobile plan with data and that ends your empowerment unless you want to turn your house into North Korea.
No amount of empowerment will help me as a parent when:
* their friends house has open wifi or even free devices where the parents let them watch/play/consume whatever they want
* when there is free wifi everywhere
* they need WhatsApp or similar to participate in school, clubs and friends groups
* "everyone has it" and not giving them it will make them social pariahs
There used to be strong cultural norms around keeping potentially harmful stuff away from kids going so far that people would not swear around the little ones. Today we have the internet that exposes ALL of that stuff to kids, even including drug analogs like tik tok.
Imagine we are in the 80ies and a coffee shop showed hardcore pornography and gave cocaine to kids on demand. Absurd. They'd been closed down and arrested within the hour.
But today it's supposedly okay but all that has really changed is that they bring their own little screens.
My sons are now adults but had substantial internet access from a very early age. They got a "safe list" of kid-friendly links plus some local software just for them. They weren't required to stick to those kid-friendly links. It was just to make it easier for them to cope.
One son was so young, he figured out how to roll the ball under the mouse with this thumb because it was too hard to cope with navigation otherwise.
I was fortunate to be able to be a full-time parent. We were a military family, so our social reality was a little different from that of a lot of people.
If your only qualification is you are a parent, I have the same qualification for holding an opinion and we can just agree to disagree here, I guess.
The underlying logic of blanket social media bans is awful, and so is the enormous leeway they open for government control of information and expression in so many other ways. This entire proposal is obviously grotesque, that so many people on a site like this don't see that just because they happen to hate Facebook et al in many ways (I myself do too) is absurd.
I don't want my freedoms taken away from me (in this case, freedom to anonymously use social media) just because some people don't have the capability or the motivation to parent their kids properly.
Also, this "what about the children" thing is a very dangerous slippery slope. The same argument is being used by backwards governments around the world to ban anything LGBT related in public.
It's both's responsibility. There's a reason why many countries forbid, for example, television ads that directly target children. As a parent you cannot completely shield what your kids are exposed to, many aspects of life are outside of your control (e.g what types of ads appear on your videos/TV) and that's where it becomes the government's problem.
Also, there are some times when coordination would result in better outcomes than single disorganized actors. I talk to parents who say they WOULD prevent their kids from using social media, but it would have negative social impacts on their kids for them to be the only ones without it.
The problem is worse because it's not up to the parents. Even if the kids opt out, they will now feel excluded because all their peers are on social media, they will still be a victim of the gossip mills and other nastiness present on social media even if they're not directly participating. That's why a blanket-wide ban for under-18s or under-16s is necessary.
I can't see any other implementation of this working, instead we'd have 2 popups now every time we visit a new site. One for cookies, the other to say "yes I'm over 18".
This doesn't mean two popups, this means we forfeit the open and distributed nature of the internet in a final "Think of the children" moment.
Far more dangerous than social media is this increasingly pervasive attitude that the government is responsible for parenting your kids.
>How you feel about all this will likely come down to whether you believe that social-media platforms are addictive products—like cigarettes—
No, the anti-smoking and anti-drinking hysteria is just as bad. I remember Christopher Hitchens like 20 years ago causing a stir in the US when he openly defended teenage drinking, pointing out that these kinds of experiences are perfectly normal and part of social life. If you look at today's teenagers in the US, anti-social, delaying almost any experience teens should make, he was completely right.
We have not had billboards for as long as I've been alive, and it is great, especially when you head over to NY or Massachusetts and see how tawdry all the billboards look.
Read more about the campaign to ban billboards and Ted Riehle here: https://vtdigger.org/2021/07/11/then-again-vermonts-billboar...
Just make the experience better for children - chiefly by removing the dark patterns that cause the problem in the first place.
Sure, companies will complain, but they're not entitled to ruining teenage mental health like that.
Unless you mean, social media for kids should be sms.
We had a whole platform(MySpace) come and go without such issues.
We still have the Patriot Act 22 years later. Be very careful what rights you give up.
I don't think it's a desirable thing for the government to regulate what type of software or speech happens on the internet, or runs on private silicon. Additionally, I don't like when the government takes on traditionally parental roles. Why are we all cheering on Washington to regulate the internet?
[0] Giving kids no autonomy at all has become a parenting norm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35417250
Most notably, I wouldn't have been able to develop any of the coping mechanisms that kept me from committing suicide during periods of depression. That is, the feeling that people out there care about me and would miss me if I died. The ability to talk to those people every day and feel love for them.
I'm autistic and the internet is the only place I was ever truly able to connect with. Only now that I've started ADHD medication—something I never would have done without the help of social media, since someone had to tell me personally that I might have ADHD—I am finally able to start trying to appreciate the real world.
But... I grew up years ago, and the world is different now. The social media back then is not the social media today. It does not have the same effect on children that it had on me, not even to mention that I'm highly neurodivergent.
Maybe that is what truly saddens me. Can not reproduce.
I live in a developing nation, and education especially on child rearing is lacking in the extreme. Easily 75 percent of middle class babies, ages 2 and up, are glued to a screen basically at all times in public. Cellphone holders in strollers.
The kid just sits there watching random TikTok videos usually. In these cases, the “attentive” mothers make sure it’s in YouTube kids. But these kids are getting 8 hours a day plus of screen time under age 4.
I’ve seen the first wave of results and it is truly buzzard, 5 year olds that do not act like 5 year old children. They do not interact with other people in any normal manner, jump around with a degree of randomness and apparent purposelessness that is completely uncharacteristic of non neurodivergent children.
This is most definitely creating divergent developmental trajectories. It looks likely to me to create a “lost generation” at a time when humanity can least afford to lose its long term planning capacity. I can only hope the situation is better in other places.
IMHO social media is the new DDT^Pb when it comes to children under 7, and seems to have very bad effects in adolescents as well.
Because the upper class, for the most part have some inkling about developmental psychology and child rearing, and the lowest of the lower class cannot afford phones for babies, I’m concerned that this is going to create a much more deeply stratified society.
Firewall! Firewall all the things
Make of a DMZ off thy router
Content inspect every common packet
Install on ev'ry device that sniffing
Snicker--alas for lack of space, a new
Line beneath: pf -f /etc/pf.conf
Firewall! A backdoor of no trivial make
Of maister's werk, a tiny hole
Strapped alongside, whistling rockets,
Detonating lines, monitored ropes
Whence thy enterprising sleuth
Perchance stumble or sneak
On day zero of the time
When secrets revealed
And figured the locks
And found the world
Beyond
Then a new sys admin is made
With belt of tools; persistence too:
A shoulder burdened with weight
Of knowledge, yet
Too a realization: imprison'd knowledge
A deliberate moat, a shadowed keep
To while the youngest times
In learning's depthsThe same song and dance was made of TV 30-50 years ago, keeping kids off the internet 15 years ago, and I'm sure for keeping kids off AI in a few years time.
The cat is out of the bag, and trying to force it back in the bag is going to be no better for kids
Educating parents on how it can harm and hinder their children is a harder, but more effective approach.
This depends on your definition of the term "works". Prohibition of many things has had a profound effect on the shape of human society. Prohibitions on religion for example, such as the repression of the Huguenots in France and of Christianity in Japan prevented the development of Protestantism and Catholicism in those countries respectively.
Prohibition and censorship of revolutionary materials and correspondence societies in 19th century Europe absolutely slowed down the process of democratization and popular reform there.
Even just in personal experience, it's much easier to get weed since it is no longer prohibited. You used to need "a source" which you had to work out in each new town or city you moved to. Then there were limits on what those people could get you.
Is it? There are a number of teachers and allied health professionals in my family and they all say that the majority of parents have zero follow-through on simple things that will materially improve their kids lives.
I can’t imagine the case would be any different with social media education for parents.
Economic power institutions are not able to stop your kids from going online, and they don't care to. They have no ethics and will slip into whatever position they need to in order to maintain face. So they'll pretend to care when they need to, but they're suck your kids into wasting entire days online in order to compile data that can be used to manipulate them politically or economically or socially when they can make money off of that.
There effectively aren't any social power institutions left (except social media itself), so the only real solution is to have a strong enough family that you can keep your kids away from this soul-rotting garbage.
Speak for yourself. I block social media sites on my home network and will be doing the same through a VPN when they get smartphones.
Porn for example is already banned from children, and they easily get hands on it. Or "violent" videogames.
I don't think there is any viable way or then it just becomes whack-a-mole thing. Ban those platforms that fail or the user accounts there...
Now, if such a step would lead to large-scale adoption of decentralized social media, that might be another issue, but as adults wouldn't be affected, I doubt they'd invest too much time into it (+ many of the people who are capable of building it don't believe that social media is a good idea).
Maybe Meta will even rebrand itself like Altria after some turnaround, as a new, "understanding" social media company, that promotes "user's choice to use..." social media.
Simply return to this standard, and make the penalty for non-compliance that your company is seized and auctioned.
Or ban social media apps on phones operated by minors.
The government would make it easier to seek damages from SM companies that cause harm to children. For example if you required the SM companies to provide proof they actively tried to help or stop in cases of bullying and if they don't the pay a large fine.
That would make it more costly to ignore and I'm pretty sure you'd fine a report button on that post to allow you to report bullying pretty quick.
Bullying happens irl as well.
The playground builders are usually not considered responsible when bullying happens at a playground.
Not only is enforcement on a judiciary level extremely difficult (the kids as well as the companies have ways and reason to skirt jurisdiction on the borderless Internet) but you have the problem that addictive products will remain addictive even if there are better options out there.
Personal opinion but I think the best way to counter the social media plague for young people will be something akin to making them "uncool in the schoolyards"
My wish would be no laws could be passed unless we have 3/4th of votes and every 10 year old law gets expired unless passed again.
Not my business, but I can’t help but wonder what these kids will think once they become of age and realize their entire childhood has been plastered online on Instagram.
My wife and I have decided if we ever have kid, we’re never going to post a single publically viewable photo or video of him/her anywhere.
Why should we ban something because parents are too lazy to do their job?
Having said that; we should immediately ban all ads without opt-in, and the same for cookies and the like.
Doing things without consent is not okay.
The controls are broken.
I got my first PC at 11, running Windows 98. Since then I've been participating in online forums and sites like facebook and myspace.
If I ever have a kid I want them to be able to experience the same stuff I did.
The early internet was pretty magical. I’m not sure we will ever get that back.
Sorry for the AI people but we probably want to have rules about data set collection as well.
Absolutely the right to privacy, the right to 'delete' and auto-deletion periods aka 'nothing is kept forever without special consent'.
Absolutely nothing about someone's social media presence can be made public or used for employment searches before age 18 aka that 'bad joke' someone told at age 16 should not ruin their life - I absolutely do not care what they said.
Content that passes a threshold of 'views' must be considered a kind of 'meta public domain' and must come with warnings/notes by the 'conduit entity' (aka FB or Twitter or Spotify) if it has medical or direct political information, aka Joe Rogan (whom I respect at least a bit except when he's yapping about vaccines) has to say 'I am not a doctor, this is not medical information' whenever he opens his fat mouth about vaccines, but he can say whatever he wants about Aliens and MMA etc..
Pricing/sign-ups/trials have to be ultra clear, and current billing has to be clear. Frankly, they should make the intermediary responsible for that as well aka if you have a recurring bill on VISA, then VISA has to list that, and, give you a means to cancel.
Total transparency on tracking, illegal to buy or sell most user data whatsoever. FYI the primary source for this is actually VISA, AMEX and MC.
And work with industry to create 'funnel optimizations' that just don't need tracking.
No advertising directly to kids unless maybe a certain kind of format (I think maybe some youtube ads are ok).
Better yet, can we just ban the thing altogether?
2. Lament how the open web has fewer options with the better used networks owned by billion dollar tech companies.
3. Blame Capitalism/Communism/Whatever the latest boogeyman is that takes the pressure off of Karens and politicians who push the latest please think of the children bullshit.
4. Goto 1.
> everything from gender identity...
Odd—they always lead with this even though it might affect less than a few percent of the population. There might be other ways to help these folks.
> might have to verify their age using official government identification
Now we're getting somewhere, that's a big problem for everyone.
Maybe if they made such sites charge money, which realistically means credit cards, it could largely solve this. Would probably reduce some of the dark patterns and mostly prevent kids from accessing them. That's how it worked with porn, didn't it?
Computers are fine, as long as they're offline.
Countless generations of kids have grown up fine in these conditions. We already know being online is bad for them.
What are we waiting for?
That's around when I started programming, where I got all the materials I could, made some warcraft 3 mods, that catapulted me pretty far..
Now where my policy differs is that I would not prevent kids from using social media, they can still show a school id and their school or parent would need to approve and taken on that legal obligation of presenting valid id. But the critical part is that kids 14-17 and 10-13 each would have their own social media. They can join facebook for example but facebook has to prevent them from coming to contsct with adults and their content or things like adult news feeds and advertisments. Similarly advertisers would become legally liable if they advertise content that steers children to a harmful end. Social media companies must also prove that their algorithms are explicitly tuned to prevent addiction if minors to the platform and even enforce maximum legal usage hours (2h for 10-13 and 6h for 14-17).