Florida Passes Sweeping Bill to Keep Young People Off Social Media | Hacker News Reader

Florida Passes Sweeping Bill to Keep Young People Off Social Media

nytimes.com

33 pointsrawgabbit62 comments

“ Requires social media platforms to use reasonable age verification methods to verify the ages of account holders and disclose specified policies and provide specified resources, measures and disclaimers.”

Problem here is what is considered “reasonable”? And how to do so without privacy issues.

The actual text of the bill lays out exactly what is "reasonable"—any website affected by the terms of this bill must offer an anonymous age verification option, with very specific requirements including that they not retain PII after verification is complete:

> A third party conducting age verification pursuant to ss. 501.1736 and 501.1737:

> (a) May not retain personal identifying information used to verify age once the age of an account holder or a person seeking an account has been verified.

https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/1/BillText/er/PDF

It will be less than a decade until there is news of a massive data breach where one of the affected companies improperly stored PII.

While I don't discount the possibility of a service screwing this up (I've been in the industry long enough to know that they will), the bill at least tries to address this by requiring that there be zero retention of age-identifying PII once the age has been verified.

That's the problem with age verification. As it stands, someone, somewhere, will certainly retain the information. Either because they want to intentionally track users (irrespective of the law saying otherwise), or unintentionally ("Oops, I thought this S3 bucket would be deleted automatically").

And, as always, the law will skew towards appearance of compliance rather than enforcement (GDPR-style), so if this goes through, you'll soon be asked to upload your driver's license to any random website.

Is not the identification that someone is of age potentially defined by this?

Or leaked it without storing it.

That can be addressed by using a three party age verification system, where the three parties are the social media site that wants to know you are above the age limit, the site that you provide proof of your identity and age to, and you.

With a properly designed protocol you can do this in such a way that (1) the social media site gets no information about you other than that you are old enough, and (2) the site your prove your identity and age to only gets whatever documents you provide and does not learn which social media site the proof is for.

That covers data breaches at the social media sites. They never see the PII for age verification.

The way to deal with the possibility of a breach at the site that does see your documents is to use a site that already have copies of those documents, such as a government agency or maybe a bank.

give it 3-5 years, tops. probably not a big player directly, but a 2nd line aggregator or value-add company.

> (a) May not retain personal identifying information used to verify age once the age of an account holder or a person seeking an account has been verified.

That's good for the people being verified. But it means the companies can't retain proof that they did, in fact, verify age. So how do companies accused of this defend themselves, especially if they're in the right? That's a bit scary in a state where the governor used his power to retaliate against the largest employer in the state for expressing their view of a law that affects their employees.

It's also going to lock out people who are well over 16 and just can't get past the verification. Like my dad: a 52 year old man who uses social media profusely, but straight up does not own a device with a working camera on it.

The year that the IRS was requiring ID verification he was prepared to just give up on filing his taxes until I came over to upload everything for him.

> by requiring social media companies to verify the ages of all users before giving them accounts.

This is not nearly so much about children as it is about de-anonymizing all internet use.

The bill specifically requires that an anonymous age verification method be provided, and lays out some pretty solid requirements on what the third-party age verification provider must do, including not retaining any PII after the user's age has been verified [0].

[0] https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/1/BillText/er/PDF

Lots of things claim to be anonymous and secure but aren't. There's no excuse to fall for this claim.

The bill doesn't say "the service must claim to be anonymous and secure", the bill says that the service must actually not retain age-verifying information. Yes, services might break the law and retain the information longer than they're legally allowed to, but under this bill that's a violation of the law, not merely false advertising.

False advertising is a crime too, and obviously you don't think people take that seriously, so why should this crime be any different?

The idea of $19 check coming to me in a class action lawsuit settlement eight years from now doesn't do much to make me trust that my data won't be leaked through either carelessness, intention, or obfuscation. (The latter being my term for the way our data is already "anonymously" traded among ad tech companies daily behind the scenes.)

Ban seems harsh, is there a compromised social media that would appease people behind this, i.e. age gate interactions to +/- 1 years until 16. Posts automatically expire. Get AI to block sexting. Seperate kids social media from adult social media. What do these parents want? Their kids to goto sunday school?

https://web.archive.org/web/20240223214515if_/https://www.ny...

This flies in the face of plenty of constitutional rights. It'll be interesting to see this hold up in court.

edit: Based on these downvotes, I am *** SO DISAPPOINTED ** in modern hacker culture. This is not the hacker culture I grew up with. The one that welcomed youth and let them cut their teeth on the internet.

There's a growing element of censorship on both the right and the left that is wholly discouraging and dangerous. We must not lose our freedoms of speech, of access, of ideas, and of free thinking.

I AM SO DISAPPOINTED IN Y'ALL.

This is antithetical to everything I know at a bone-deep level.

Get this desire to control and to censor out of your minds.

Free thinking leads to a mind unbound by physics, uncaged by dictators. Censorship in all of its forms leads to polarization and lionization of evil thoughts and deeds. Do not succumb to this.

Surely it can be treated the same as liquor and cigarettes?

Is speech the same as a substance sold over the counter?

Religious speech can be dangerous, addictive, and is regularly inflicted upon minors who have no choice. Is a ban appropriate?

There's a constitutional right for minors to access social media?

Yes, direct quote from the founding fathers: “The right of young people to access TikTok shall not be infringed”.

The government here is both stopping citizens from reading others opinions and publishing their own, that would seem to be a first amendment slam dunk.

Huh?

Is Florida prohibiting its citizens from writing opinions in this? I thought the bill was about an age minimum for using an internet product.

It's simultaneously a restriction on what kinds of content you're allowed to distribute to other people if you happen to be operating an internet product.

That type of restriction has a lot of existing precedent when we're talking about distributing content to children under the age of 16.

“Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the Court:

TikTok et al have a constitutional right to target minors with their social media internet products”

Yeah good luck with that.

What about "parental rights" to determine whether their child can use social media? I thought conservatives hated having big government take away decisions from parents?

Is this not similar to the current COPPA regulations that makes having <13 y/o users burdening to the point of prohibiting them on many websites? Or is this significantly different because it technically doesn't ban them, just makes it practically impossible for social media to have them, so the business does the banning?

EDIT: I was complaining about the bill's provisions against distributing "material harmful to minors", unaware of existing obscenity laws that permit states to restrict it.

Small but significant correction: the three parts of the test you lay out are joined by an AND, not an OR. So websites are restricted from distributing material that "appeals to the prurient interest" AND "depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct" AND "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors". If the website is not substantially composed of material that meets all three tests then the bill does not require age verification.

Ah, thank you. I've updated my comment. Still, I maintain that it creates a new restriction, since some kinds of erotic writing would meet all three bars, meaning that websites are required under the bill to either place an age bar, or moderate all user-generated text everywhere for such content.

That's also where the "substantial portion" requirement comes in, which is defined to be 33.3%. That won't affect most sites with user-generated content—even Tumblr wouldn't be required to verify ages to view.

That particular definition of "harmful material" mirrors the definition of obscenity, which is not protected speech.

I'm curious which rights you would consider this violating?

Off the top of my head the commerce clause and the first amendment since social media is all about publishing things.

The first amendment does not apply to private companies. They can censor, alter, or remove any content they disagree with. This applies to adults and minors for virtually all platforms.

https://www.freedomforum.org/free-speech-on-social-media/

Of course, but here the government is denying access, not a company.

I don't know, pushing kids off platforms is probably good way to get them to start hacking together solutions to fill niche. Getting around barriers / obstacles not the worst thing to incentivize around.

Whatever happened to the less government and personal responsibility?

I have never spoken to a person in real life who I could even imagine disagreeing with this, but I am expecting a supermajority of media and internet voices to create a very different impression.

It seems fairly non-controversial given what appear to be the negative impacts of social media on young people.

You genuinely cannot see the meta-problem with this?

When there is billions of $ on the line people turn their brains off. The amount of money involved is so large that all decisions become tainted.

How many of those people are 16 or younger?

Also I think due to COPPA, no under 13s are on Instagram or others with independent accounts. So this bill only targets 13, 14 and 15 year olds.

The measure — which Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would “be wrestling with” over the weekend and has not yet signed …………..The new rules in Florida, passed on Thursday, would require social networks to both prevent people under 16 from signing up for accounts and terminate accounts that a platform knew or believed belonged to underage users. It would apply to apps and sites with certain features, most likely including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.

Top of my wish list is a time limit on time spent playing video games for under 18yo’s, to be imposed on and enforced by consoles and platform providers (eg Steam, iOS).

This will only result in kids going nuts when they turn 18 without time to ease into their adult freedoms.

I hope my son learns how to budget his time before he turns 18. But ya, there are guard rails that will progressively get weaker as he ages so he can ease into it.

Doesn't China already do something similar with limiting game play for children? Instead of speculating about the result there's potentially data about the result that can be looked at. (Of course that's if the data coming from there can be trusted.)

It’s only for online games, so I don’t think it’s very comparable to a blanket playtime limit on video gaming.

Ok, it's not perfectly 1 to 1, but you think there's nothing that can be learned from the results of banning online games for children with regards to banning video games in general for children?

For one, banning online games is much easier (if your accounts are appropriately verified), and because of piracy, China’s gaming industry evolved into a mostly freemium model that demands addicting its young and adult customers to the game.

This is really different from little johnny playing super Mario Wonder on their Switch, how would you even implement that?

Interesting, I'm super opposed to that! Parents who are able to exercise some control over their children's activities already enforce these limits, and parents who can't could do far worse than kids playing video games.

The problem is many parents aren't parents, but a single parent who works multiple jobs. They can't easily control what their kids do since they are not home.

Yeah, I get that completely. In those cases, video games are a comparatively harmless thing for children with no supervision to opt into.

Unless the kid is addicted and plays 5 hours a day. He may not be socializing, getting his homework done, studying, etc.

Agreed, I'm not arguing that video game addiction is good -- it's not. I'm saying that if a parent doesn't have the ability to enforce rules (whether by lack of ability, or because they're too busy supporting the family, or any other reason), then a child breaking the rules to play video games is much better than them breaking the rules in other more destructive ways.

If this had been implemented during my youth, I might have actually gone out and joined my peers in underage drinking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com