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Comment by mentos | Hacker News Reader

What if you consider social media to be like cigarettes?

I don't see regulators pushing for Meta and Google to be broken up, or for ISPs to nuke TikTok in the USA. It's been talked about for years but nothing ever happens.

I took it to mean the age restrictions and restrictions on advertising to kids, not an anti-trust action.

> What if you consider social media to be like cigarettes?

Well, then people should show some ID before using the internet or something to prove they are adults? How do you enforce that? at the ISP level? at the device level? At the website level? Genuine question. Who's responsibility is that? In a society where nobody wants to be responsible for anything?

To buy ammo online, you need to upload a photo of your drivers license. It’s much, much cheaper to buy ammo this way.

So there are regulated industries where age restriction is already being handled.

Even if you did, parents shouldn't allow their kids to get cigarettes. Parents trying to get out of parenting is getting old already.

Are you a parent? It certainly doesn't sound like it. While you might be able to keep a preteen away from things, once they are teenagers you can not prevent then from doing something they want to do. The amount of teenage pregnancies in states where they preach abstinence instead of doing sexual education is a pretty strong proof of that.

I think you're being too harsh on the parents. I don't know a single parent who allowed their kids to get cigarettes, but I also don't know a single teen who ever said "I'd like to smoke but my parents don't allow it so no, thanks". They just smoked behind their parents' backs.

I feel the comparison to cigarettes is apt: I know of children who had an "official" Facebook account for their parents and a "real" one for their school friends. And while I'm not sure I 100% agree with the lawsuit, I think it's worth asking: given how much money these companies invested in hooking teens up and how much they profited from it, should they also be held accountable for the negative effects of said hooking up?

And if the cigarette companies advertise to the kids? And the second hand smoke is everywhere (everyone else using them) and are almost ubiquitous now? Such that the only way around that is to cut those kids off from society?

I agree with you on parenting, but I won't, for a second, let these companies off the hook for the damage they cause.

Give them an inch, they'll take your entire soul if they can and it will help their quarterly P&L. Don't forget it.

> And if the cigarette companies advertise to the kids?

It's illegal. Tiktok, Facebook, ... nonsense on the other hand isn't, because these platforms aren't responsible for the content they broadcast, by regulation. So should these regulations change?

Of course, I know it's illegal. I'm using the comparison to highlight it.

It's as if we're allowing cigarette companies to be all pervasive through general access and direct advertising to our kids, and then saying: "but the parents shouldn't let them smoke, man, they're not responsible parents".

I think that's unfair at this stage.

Yes, perhaps regulation needs to change.

The law has far more power over corporations than society has over parents and parents have over children. We are better off doing what is most effective: regulate the industry.

I think you over-estimate how much control parents do have, or even should have, over their own children.

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