FTC suggests new rules to shift parents' burden of protecting kids to websites

Meta and their lobbyists have been pounding advertising in the DC media market on TV, radio, and the Washington Post under all their brands about how they now support the government trying to mandate parents rights to limit access. First it was Instagram branded, but I've seen ads for their other brands lately as well.

It started when the Surgeon General released the report on the effects of social media usage on adolescent health [0].

[0] https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/youth-mental-h...

You can expect a kid to be online before they turn into teenager. At least to some extent. Moderation of that through parents is horrible (it's clise to surveillance / watch every step of your child).

It's just that first consumption age went down and audience widened.

Overall I think the internet has become safer, especially through the required handling of content complaints. It's just that the usage went into a direction that needs more safeguards.

It's make sense to me 20-30 years ago access to computers and internet was not easy so could be controlled a bit by parents. Today Parents can try to control their own childrens devices but reality is most children run circles around their parents when it comes to tech. Yes we the tech enthusiast might not be fooled by our children but not the case for the large portion of the population.

Most of us don't like it or won't agree but the days of the internet being the wild west will slowly be over it will be converted to a regulated internet as the powers that be/people in power don't like it when they can't control.

I'll reply with a bunch of anecdotes, so please bear with me.

A few trends over the last two decades:

* targeted monetization of everything under the sun

* a total shift towards a subscription economy for nearly everything digital.

* a near total shift towards mobile content consumption devices especially for younger consumers (tablets and phones)

has likely resulted in the following:

* low quality algorithmically driven junk food content (tiktok, instagram reels, the garbage people post to advice subreddits)

* startups j-curving for usage and leaning into advertising as their only viable business case

* Google scraping your inbox for ad keywords in the mid 2000s and beyond, Microsoft injecting ads into Windows 10 and 11, etc.

Perhaps worse:

* Generation Alpha and later Gen Z kids having relatively diminished technical literacy compared to elder Gen Z and Millenials (absolutely anecdotal. I'm citing three teacher friends frustrated that kids navigate their way around computers more poorly with each passing year)

* subconscious mass influence of behavior patterns (foreign election interference, your trip to your local McDonald's, sneaker hype culture)

Practically the only thing that hasn't actually gotten worse online, regardless of our own diverse opinions about it, is Wikipedia. It's a for-profit warzone of competing interests making competing edits, but it's an example of what can happen when the constant growth/profit/exit-motive isn't there.

Many of the hobbyist sites running on sites like vbulletin or invision are gone; we use subreddits for those now. And people don't even bother with those, more and more people just post meme gifs in the comments of reels, sitting there scrolling through with their thumbs rather than contributing something new and unique.

If you have Paramount+ there was a South Park special, "South Park (Not Suitable For Children)", released there a couple of days ago that covers (excellently and hilariously) some of this.

The Chinese government rightly recognizes that these dark patterns are like crack for young underdeveloped minds.

Unsure why this comment was flagged. I took a look at the proposed changes in the press release and it seems like things HN would support. Is it because the rules are centered around kids? Yea I'd like the same rules applied to my demographic, but this seems like a good step forward.

How do randomly generated cryptographic keys change anything? They're just usernames+passwords that you don't need to remember.

I understand your perspective, but I'm going to disagree with what I think you mean, which is that /only/ parents should be responsible for their kids, and that nobody else should have to do anything at all for them. I know that's not exactly what you said, but given the context it's what I am going to argue against.

Kids are a normal part of our society. We were all kids at one point. Our lives were all made better by reasonable accomodations that others made for our safety and wellbeing. If the outside world is only designed for adults, then there is an impossible burden on parents to raise children.

I think we can and often do make reasonable accomodations for kids. Like checking IDs at the bar or checking heights before letting people on a rollercoaster.

What that level of responsibility is for websites, I'm not sure. But it's not zero.

Websites aren't responsible for my kids. They should just provide a working mechanism for me to block them other than "I promise Im 18!". Currently it is impossible to safeguard the internet to kids once they know how to read and write.

The privacy concern is BS. Your provider already knows everything you do online. The solution is easy too - sites add a blocking flag that the internet provider uses to block access to the content unless told otherwise by the subscriber.

This has 0 privacy concerns. After all, despite https, Comcast knows what you are doing if you go to pornhub.com. And it costs nothing. A string with a magic number.

Parents should be responsible for their kids, not Tobacco companies.

Of course. But in many other areas involving things that are harmful to children we require others to do things that make it easier for the parents.

A couple examples are that we require purveyors of cigarettes and alcoholic drinks to check customer IDs and not sell to children, and we require annoying childproof packaging on many products.

So we've generally already accepted that it is not just parents who should have some responsibility toward children.

100% agree. And websites should also be responsible for their websites.

That businesses should restrict things like this is not a very controversial thing; try using the "parents should be responsible for their kids, not liquor stores" line after selling booze to a 12-year old and see how well that goes for you.

You can't expect parents to be on top of their children 100% of the time. Aside from being unrealistic, helicopter parenting also isn't good for children. Parents need to be able to give children some reasonable amounts of freedom with the confidence they'll be reasonably safe.

Now, if you want to argue what "reasonably safe" means and where and how we make this trade-off: great! Let's do that!

But discussion stoppers like this aren't hugely helpful, or insightful, or anything.

So easy to say, so hard to do.

With heroic effort I can maybe lock down my routers, my kids devices, all devices in my house and they can just go to a friends house and see or, maybe even purchase, every single thing that we[1] have deemed unsafe or inappropriate to children. I am not just talking about porn but drugs, every conceivable type of violence, every conceivable type of crime and criminal, every kind of advertisement, every kind of political propaganda. From the point of view of a parent, the internet is a pipe that potentially connects your child's innocence and naivety to every single bad influence and predator in the world.

Yes, I could keep my kids offline but then they'd pay the price of being complete outsiders.

I don't actually have a solution because I don't trust the government to regulate the internet but from a societal POV of a society that wants to keep existing it's probably best to make the easy path sane and safe per default. That's the way we tried to do it in the past, anyways.

[1] we, as in the majority of people in the majority of societies

Yeah, parenting is hard work and takes lots of time.

Something something two parents working…