Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16 | Hacker News Reader

Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

reuters.com

335 pointshotdailys738 comments

Let the experiment take place, I say. Just like Oregon’s now-repealed drug use decriminalization bill. It didn’t achieve its intended goals, but there is now a mass of data about what assumptions were wrong, implementation issues, etc. IMO there is real value in letting states put such changes into play to get beyond the debate and actually test the hypotheses.

> IMO there is real value in letting states ... test the hypotheses.

"Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will have no other" -- Benjamin Franklin

Experience keeps a dear school, yet Fools will learn in no other.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/05/25/dear-school/

> The adjective “dear” means high-priced, costly, or expensive in the context below

To save someone else a click

Policy-making isn't supposed be, at least shouldn't be, some lab experiment. The hey at least we tried isn't the best reasoning for the lack of insight of those in charge.

Justice Brandeis, who coined the term "laboratories of democracy", felt otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy

Ah yes, I almost forgot we're talking about the US where it was OK for the state to secretly conduct mind control human experimentation for over 20 years.

Could you explain a bit more about how Brandeis' philosophy relates to that case? Was he actively arguing for this sort of experiment, or are you just trying to imply that "experimentation"/science means you lack any morals?

Apparently it wasn't "ok" if it had to be done secretly...

It's not as if the US government can't do something secretly then declare that it was perfectly legal after they get caught. Just because they don't want to have to go through to trouble of justifying their actions to the public that doesn't mean they must consider their actions inappropriate

History is full of governments overthrown by a dissenting populace. The US itself broke out of the British empire when they didn’t like the government anymore.

If they do something egregious, then people revolt.

> If they do something egregious, then people revolt.

Do you mean something egregious like the mass surveillance of the population, or the mass incarceration of citizens, or widespread theft via civil asset forfeiture, or executions by police, or human experimentation on Americans, or dropping bombs on citizens in US cities, or the military shooting protesting college kids, or lying about weapons of mass destruction to justify wars, or prisoners being tortured, or being subjected to virtual strip searches and groping at airports, or two thirds of the population living in "constitution free zones", or the authorization of the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, or any of the other many many egregious actions that have already been and/or are still being carried out by our government?

My point is that the threat of revolt is extremely remote. For all of the abuses and the erosion of our rights and freedoms we've had just one attempt at violent insurrection in recent history. It involved about 2,000 rioters motivated by a conspiracy theory and it fell apart very quickly. The threat of a successful revolt is basically zero, and that's actually a good thing. A revolt is highly unlikely to solve the problems that we have. Unfortunately that also means that the threat of revolt is highly unlikely to act as any sort of deterrent that might prevent abuses of power by our government. We're far better off making use of whatever is left of our democracy than trying to re-enact the revolutionary war.

The life of the average american citizen is still really good, even though the rights of some minority populations have been violated.

If we look at the quality of life for american citizens compared to other the quality of life of other nations right before revolution (famously french, russian, chinese), we are not close.

So maybe it's not a good idea to burn it down and start over just yet.

> The threat of a successful revolt is basically zero

That's what they all say. But the US lost the war in vietnam and afghanistan to natives with extremely low tech weapons.

I wonder what the people who were forcibly sterilized after Buck v Bell thought of Brandeis' philosophy.

Could you explain a bit more about how Brandeis' philosophy relates to that case? Was he pro-sterilization, or are you just trying to imply that "experimentation"/science means you lack any morals?

I think the argument is that states are not laboratories for behaviors that violate the constitutional rights of others, or in the case of this law, go beyond the legislative branch's constitutional powers, so that just suggesting there isn't an experiment is in itself not sufficient to defend this law.

I don’t think banning social media use by minors either violates constitutional rights or exceeds constitutional powers. And the constitutional powers of a state legislature to enact state laws are extremely broad; much more so than the powers of Congress to enact federal laws.

Well such speech restrictions have been found unconstitutional by the supreme court in prior cases, so I'm not so sure what your "characterization" of the law and its alleged constitutionality is based upon. Further, what point is it that state legislatures have broader powers than Congress? They still have no power to exceed the boundaries of the first amendment, so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make there either.

I don’t think this law violates the First Amendment, and it wasn’t particularly clear that was your objection in the first place. I’m also not sure why you put the word “characterization” in quotes since I didn’t use it.

Because I don't think its much of a characterization. You don't? Well that's great. It never occurred to you that I might think so? Have you read any actual commentary on this law? Its by far its biggest issue

This was your comment that I was replying to, with emphasis added:

> I think the argument is that states are not laboratories for behaviors that violate the constitutional rights of others, or in the case of this law, go beyond the legislative branch's constitutional powers, so that just suggesting there isn't an experiment is in itself not sufficient to defend this law.

This comment implies that your objection to the law was not that it infringed upon constitutional rights, but rather that it exceeded the powers of Florida legislature. This was the point I was replying to. If that’s not the point you intended to make, then never mind.

And yet it is.

How else are we going to find out which policies work, if we can't perform experiments? The experiment is the basic tool of science.

Some experiments can't be performed, for ethical reasons.

We don't test if parachutes work by throwing people not wearing them out of planes, for one.

States can experiment with variability in their legislature, but there is a unified federal law that guarantees certain fundamental rights. Much of the south is currently trampling all over them.

Of all the states I can think of which are blatantly infringing upon an enumerated constitutional right, none of them are in the south, unless you’re going to be pedantic and count California and Hawaii.

No person without body autonomy can be considered 'secure in their person, houses, papers, or effects'.

In fact, none of the other rights matter when the state can control what you can, and can't do with your own body. It is the most fundamental of rights.

They are also doing a great job of trampling on the fourteenth amendment, with the occasional jabs at the first.

> No person without body autonomy can be considered 'secure in their person, houses, papers, or effects'.

It wasn’t the southern states that imposed vaccine mandates for dining in restaurants, either.

I know what you’re alluding to; suffice to say that I don’t find this legal theory particularly compelling, and more importantly, neither does the Supreme Court.

> We don't test if parachutes work by throwing people not wearing them out of planes

We’re seriously comparing not having TikTok and Instagram for a few years to death?

You’re assuming the politicians enacting this law care about such data much less learn anything from it.

No he's not because the experiment doesn't depend on them. Social science researchers use these kinds of sudden differences in laws all the time to study their effects. People in general can look at the outcomes too if they're obvious enough.

I don't think it's very likely we'll get any actionable data out of this. It doesn't actually stop children from accessing social media, or even creating accounts on social media sites. Tracking social media usage by children will depend entirely on self-reported data and there are an endless amount of confounding variables that would make a direct comparison of children's mental health difficult/impossible to attribute to this one change.

Digital IDs are becoming more and more a thing. Soon it will be quite easy to validate that someone is over 16 or require a parent to provide their ID and vouch instead.

This is an old way of thinking and with some recent developments more of the wild west internet will die.

reference: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/01/oregon-drug...

> Let the experiment take place, I say

It is an unconstitutional law; it is following the path of similar unconstitutional laws¹²³. Where is the experiment?

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan...

²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reno_v._American_Civil_Liberti... (sections about minor access to indecent material struck down)

³https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/ohio/oh...

These rulings are 13 and 27 years old (the third is in progress), so I'd argue that revisiting the legal analysis of the laws and precedents is useful here in itself.

What's changed in 27 years to make you say this? Certainly not the Constitution. The last amendment was passed over 30 years ago.

27 years ago we didn’t have children spending 90% of their waking hours staring at network connected devices.

Only the nerds did that and it was in a computer lab. And they knew enough about keeping up appearances to hit Alt-Tab when an adult was getting close.

How is that legally relevant?

As society changes, it’s reasonable for a court to re-examine the effects of previously decided legislation to gauge whether the impact and societal cost can be justified.

It’s not like we don’t have other laws that restrict what we can do or where we can do it.

How would that change the constitutionality (or lack thereof) of the matter?

Rulings on the constitutionality (or lack thereof) of laws are issued by a body of people which changes over time, and have been known to be overturned or updated.

Maybe they are all relevant upon full scrutiny, but that isn't obvious to me (albeit IANAL). I know what my kids buying a potentially violent video game is like, and I know it is very different than participating in social media. And regarding the CDA in the 90's, take some of the opinion:

In order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the CDA effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another. That burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statute was enacted to serve.

That's just me grabbing a snippet from Wikipedia, but it seems like a different issue than the impact of social media and whether it should be allowed by minors w/o parental consent.

Those rulings all differ from the current situation in multiple aspects. For example, it was determined that the VG industry is effectively self-regulating. It's questionable that Tiktok is effectively regulating itself with respect to minors. And the CDA required the government to unconstitutionally determine decency, whereas the Florida law is about access.

But of course the elephant in the room is that the makeup of the Court has changed in a markedly more conservative direction and has proven itself not averse to revisiting previously settled law.

What is constitutional about releasing psychological warfare techniques on children? Because that is what these social media platforms are doing.

Maybe those rulings were wrong. The Constitution says to "promote the general welfare".

I only see these as approximate precedents in the rough sense that they involve limiting minors’ access to speech. Otherwise, factually, I can see several distinguishing features:

- social media being optimized for addiction

- social media potentially compromising minors’ physical safety

- social media use having documented adverse mental health outcomes for minors

- the fact that social media use requires an ongoing contractual relationship between the company and the minor

I could see these factors tipping the balance on the “compelling government interest” question, though I see less of an argument for “narrow tailoring”.

Only that last feature seems relevant IMO.

I think that the rest of the points you brought up are cultural problems and therefore not in the purview of legality

Well, the test courts use when they evaluate the constitutionality of a law that curtails a fundamental right (such as speech) is twofold: 1) Does the law serve a compelling government interest? 2) Is the law narrowly tailored to serve that interest?

The features I listed all relate to “protecting the children” in some way, which is why I thought they could be the basis for courts to distinguish previous case law regarding the first part of the test.

> Well, the test courts use when they evaluate the constitutionality of a law that curtails a fundamental right (such as speech) is twofold: 1) Does the law serve a compelling government interest? 2) Is the law narrowly tailored to serve that interest?

Almost right. Strict scrutiny has a third factor [1]: Does the law use the available method which is least restrictive of speech?

An alternative method to banning young children on social media could be to apply the caretaker-consent-or-ban condition on social media only for students on the physical premises of public schools while having the public schools teach students the pros and cons of social media (hopefully noting that social media is more helpful than harmful for most teenagers [2]). Enforcement would fall on parents and public school teachers. That's less restrictive of minors' speech rights because the ban doesn't apply everywhere, and also less chilling of social media sites' speech rights because having to collect more of users' personal information for age verification is burdensome. Not saying that my example method is a good one, just more likely to pass strict scrutiny.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny#Applicability

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/yet-another-massive-stud...

I almost feel embarrassed to be so pedantic, but it's actually not clear that it is a third factor. Quite a few scholars interpret this requirement as being a component of "narrow tailoring", or vice versa. Realistically, I don't think many cases will hinge on this distinction: if a less restrictive method exists that can serve the compelling interest comparably well, then of course the more restrictive method isn't narrowly tailored, and is overbroad.

Parental consent would be less restrictive than what this law proposes.

Thinking about this, the government is all over the place. A 16 year old minor can decide for themselves, the government trusts a parent to make the decision for a 14-15 year old, and the government doesn't trust anyone to make the decision for a 13 year old. Either a kid needs to be protected or they don't. If they do, either you trust the parents to make the decision or you don't.

I can't think of a single argument that fits with trusting a parent's choice for a 14 year old that doesn't trust it for a 13 year old, that also ignore's that parent's choice for a 16 year old.

Those aren't factual though, those are one just one side of an opinionated argument. Social media can also be argued to have positive values. IE, I would argue that most kids use social media not because of being addicted, but because they find and form new types of communities:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594763/#:~:text=Social...

Given it's Florida and the political leanings of it's governor, I would argue the law is more in line with CCP/Communist values: attempt to disrupt the communication networks of a demographic that is highly against you.

This is one of those times when legal English sounds like everyday English, but isn't. In this context, "factual" doesn't mean "proven true", but rather "of the category of issues that are factual in nature" (instead of legal in nature). The point here is that the factual bases Florida will offer in support of there being a compelling governmental interest are somewhat different (and probably better substantiated) than the factual bases California gave in Brown, for example.

The reason this matters is that the precedential effect of a prior opinion such as Brown depends on how similar the underlying facts are to the present dispute. If a court wants to go in a different direction, it will usually prefer not to overturn the previous opinion, but rather to say that it doesn't apply here because the facts are different.

According to Jonathan Haidt's research, most teens would prefer to not be on social media because they recognize the toxicity of it but feel compelled to be on it because they have FOMO.

It's an experiment in if the new court will actually care

> Let the experiment take place, I say.

I think the experiment is more about the judiciary and about tribal politics. There's ample case law against something like this, so to me this seems unconstitutional, and I doubt it will stand. But DeSantis will win some more heart and minds of the folks who secretly do want big government protecting them from the boogieman.

Regardless of anyone's views about social media, the fact that the government wants 'papers please' for you to access a website should really scare everyone.

Laws are often just social signals in writing. A law indicates that a large group agrees that something is bad. Often times people find it easier to just agree with a law rather than navigate the mental gray area around behaviors that aren't black and white.

Is that the case here? What is that large group and what is it comprised of? Does it represent all Floridians?

Of course it doesn't represent all mindsets. That's what elections are for. All Floridians participate in the vote to elect a desired philosophy into power and then the winning party hopes that philosophy will reflect in the laws and policies created in the near future. You elect a like minded leader to act on your interests so you don't have to micro manage the governance of a state.

The alternative could be to have every piece of legislation go to popular vote rather than elected officials. I feel this could be wrought with problems though as the public could get vote fatigue and weird laws would slip through simply through low turnout or "social media fueled" outliers for extreme turnout on specific bills.

I am well aware of how direct democracy vs representative democracy works, so I don't need you to educate me on the subject. My issue with your comment is that you assume that a large group of people agree with the law as if we're talking about direct democracy, which I believe is not true. I do not believe that a large number of Floridians (large enough to matter in terms of voting, I'm not saying large as in city-large) agree with requiring an ID to access social media. The same thing happened with reproductive rights. As it turns out, an even larger group of republicans don't really agree with banning abortion, although their representatives think otherwise.

That understanding really breaks down when partisan politics are involved - if it's us vs. them you can do a lot of stuff without your base raising a stink as long as it's posed as being against your opposition.

Pollitical chicken.

This is such an unhelpful platitude.

>>A law indicates that a large group agrees that something is bad.

No, it only indicates that a potentially very small group who has gained power agrees that something is bad.

This is especially true in a system that does not require runoff elections (or an Instant Runoff voting system) so that the winner must gain a majority of votes, or where various forms of voter suppression, skewing, or not playing by the rules happen (e.g., sham elections as happened in Russia).

Exactly this. It's unfortunate that in the United States today, my initial reaction to new law is: "what money is behind this". It's not the standard that laws are being made for protecting citizens, but instead a minority of the wealthy with vested interests in playing unfairly through their capital and relationships.

> But DeSantis will win some more heart and minds of the folks who secretly do want big government protecting them from the boogieman.

Those supporters aren't very secret about it. In fact, they are quite open about it.

> the government wants 'papers please' for you to access a website should really scare everyone

We've been doing that for R and X movies forever.

> We've been doing that for R and X movies forever.

Those aren't enforced by the government. Movie ratings and the enforcement of them are entirely voluntary on the part of producers and theaters. Some films are released that are non-rated, and enforcement at the ticket booth/theater level has never been consistent or particularly effective. Enforcement by retail is basically non-existent (Nobody is stopping a 13 year old from buying an R rated movie at walmart), and it's the same with streaming services. Quite rightly, it's up to parents to police what media their kids watch.

Wasn't Janet Jackson fined for a nipslip during her Superbowl Show?

I recall Howard Stern being fined $millions for indecency on radio.

> Wasn't Janet Jackson fined for a nipslip during her Superbowl Show?

Overturned by the SCOTUS because of all of that free speech. And CBS was fined, not Janet Jackson. And the Howard Stern content is a well-known free speech issue. And OP was responding to your comment about movies. None of these are movies, so I don't understand why you would bring up something like this. Public radio and TV broadcast are a different beast. Is your argument that private social media services are akin to public broadcasters? Let's see what the courts think.

I brought it up because it is an instance of the government restricting speech.

The case law actually supports this. Lots of speech is restricted from minors and since social media companies aren’t publicly funded institutions it’s even more ironclad. For instance public schools have more restrictions on limiting expression than private schools.

I think it’s excellent the government is taking a stand to protect kids when it’s obvious most parents are unable to. Kids have no business in the discourse.

Let's see how this plays out in the courts, then. This is why I said this is an experiment for the judiciary. One of the issues here is that it restricts speech towards people who do not have an ID.

The problem is that once such a thing fails, it gives massive ammunition to future naysayers that get to conveniently ignore all the implementation failures because campaigning for/against will ultimately boil down to bullet points.

So it's better to not have any data and live in continued ignorance?

No, but saying “ah, what does it matter if we try things haphazardly? If we fail we just try the thing again in a couple of years” is equally naive.

It’s better to have no data than one high-profile poorly-executed experiment.

I disagree. Lots of things are executed poorly and the learning from those result in subsequent improvements.

Everything in our society at scale is going to be “poorly executed”.

If your idea only succeeds when the smartest people are running it, and they can’t make any mistakes, then it’s not actually a good idea.

How many times have any of us created a PoC that gets deployed into production? Things fall down, and are attempted to be improved like changing a tire on car driving 60mph down the highway without pulling over.

Do you stop the car, take a look at everything, make changes, and then put the car back on the road? Do you pull into pit row, change the tires in <10s with top off of the tank, and then get back in the race? Do you take advantage of the run flat tires you chose in advance anticipating the this would be the likely outcome while hoping the other 3 tires stay inflated?

If the current situation isn't work, the worst thing to do is nothing. Paralysis by analysis can be deadly

If only it were possible for terms like “poorly-executed” to adjust for context.

Alas, language is not so flexible.

I'm an Oregon resident.

I disagree to an extent. Oregons drug decriminalization failed because of a few reasons that are plain to see:

- The people who wrote the measure did not prescribe how it should be done, just what it should achieve.

- The measure demanded changes be immediate, which didn't jive with a very slow running, heavy bureaucracy like Oregons government. More importantly, time was not given for the social services pipelines to fill with cash and plans.

- The law did not also ban public drug use, it depended on the legislature doing this - which they never did. This was the big tipping point. You don't forget the smell of meth or fent, especially outside your grocery store or kids school.

This was a master class in when head in the clouds thinking meets legislative elites who are outright insulted when the people flex their voice.

I do think we'll revisit this again in the future, but hopefully next time we at least ban public drug use.

Yeah, I'm saddened that everyone is jumping on the "whelp, back to the war on drugs" band wagon...

This is a thing we can do and make work, plenty of other places have had success with it, we just keep doing things in the most Kafka-esque way possible.

> plenty of other places have had success with it

Which places, and what do you call success?

The only place in the world that seems to have drugs handled properly is Singapore.

With the always caveat that no other nation can replicate what Singapore does without widespread use of slavery or culling/exiling the poor.

Not only that, people (well, mammals) want to get high. Alchohol is so much more destructive than weed or MDMA, on both a personal or societal scale. If you’d ban alcohol, people will just sniff glue or start brewing their own bathtub hooch.

Legalization + proper harm reduction + strict enforcement on public (ab)use is ultimately the way. You get a triple win of tax income, freed up police resources and less pressure on the healthcare system.

hopefully next time we at least ban public drug use.

"The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges" - Anatole France

I think I get what you're saying, but you're not being super clear with that quote.

Ideally before we ban public drug use with punitive measures we solve free housing for the homeless. It is a known problem, specifically in Portland, that people come here to be homeless. That is a problem in itself because our tiny city can't shoulder the nations burdens. I was mainly speaking directly to what backfired with our approach to substances. Public drug use, whether it be alcohol or otherwise, should not be on the general public to deal with.

This is a feature of the US system. Dont think we can work around it.

Imagine that Biden campaigned in 2000 extensively off a hoax that Trump called nazis fine people. This was well supported by professional media.

Just remember this is the same guy who told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by." And they in fact did rise up on Jan 6.

That he was defending people at all associated with the unite the right protest that went all neo Nazi is crazy. Why bother trying to point out that there were “good” and “fine” people protesting the statue when we all know what was going on at that event? It minimizes what happened, and reduces the blame on the literal Nazis marching and driving into crowds.

It wasn’t a “hoax”, but it was choice editing. But if you look at the spirit and context, it’s effectively what happened.

“Choice editing” is another way to put it. Which is precisely what i was alluding to. It is a feature of the US system. Professional media including the so called papers of the record excel in it.

That assumes (at the very least) that any data gathered from such an "experiment" would be representative of what the effects of such legislation would be elsewhere.

Perhaps... but my guess is that repeatability wouldn't depend on the children but on the wants and needs of the governing politicians.

That is, the data would, in my view, likely be worthless for its purported goal, but can give some insight into some political shenanigans.

I don't follow your logic. The legislation is designed to minimize the negative effects of social media on teens. This can be measured and compared to states other than Florida. How do 'the needs of the governing politicians' confound that data?

It can be measured?

Yes, it can.

> It can be measured?

If it can’t, that’s a strong signal.

Completely agree. Let states experiment and learn from each other.

Hopefully the courts cut this down in the cradle. It's clearly an attack on 1st amendment rights and state laws can't supersede the 1st amendment. Whether your kid is online on social media or not is the responsibility of parents. Conservatives rail against the "nanny state" and then pull this junk? I'm glad it will most likely be shot down in court quickly and decisively. Laws like this are toes in the water to see how much freedom repressive state governments can get away with.

"Whether your kid is online on social media or not is the responsibility of parents"

Really ?

I mean the entire point of the nanny state argument is to not act as a nanny toward ADULT citizen. Minor should still be protected, especially under 16

If you can't keep your 14 year old off social media then your 14 year old is out of control, I had no such problem with my children. Their devices were locked down and they knew repercussions and grounding would be in order if they didn't listen. Once they hit 16 I didn't mind as much, and they had some SM freedom. They're both well adjusted adults now and in college, and I'm very proud of them. We're still close as ever, nothing bad happened as a result of them having guard rails as tweens and teens.

Are you disagreeing with me ? I think you're 100% right

It depends on what the change is. I wouldn't approve states trialing slavery. I don't agree with the social media law as well. It's a cultural tool, so let parents dictate what they want their kids to see or use. If anything, they could push laws to give parents better tools/information to help them manager their kid's screen time, not just an outright ban.

> It's a cultural tool, so let parents dictate what they want their kids to see or us.

Monumentally naïve. Zero understanding of the way things work in reality.

What is naive about the point? And what is your argument? You don't make one to read.

To me, this is the same thing we all lived through in the 90s in America when particular political parties were blaming video games for violence:

https://ncac.org/resource/a-timeline-of-video-game-controver...

I recall hearing Professor Haidt (NYU) describe an experiment he ran with teenagers. He asked them how much they'd have to be paid (per month?) to not use some social media site. The typical answer was ~$40.

Then he said that they were going to get all the other kids in the school off the social media site, and asked again what the student would want to be paid to be off the site. The answer was that students would actually pay to be in that situation.

For some kids at least, this is a coordination problem, where they'd all rather not be on social media, but assuming others are, they want to be there. I could be getting the details/dollar values wrong, and I don't know that this bill is the right way to address the issue.

But it's pretty clear that social media is something that many teens wish they could avoid, but currently feel they can't. That doesn't mean we need to Do Something™, but it does mean that we're not currently in the optimal situation.

Edit: found the experiment. Haidt wrote about it, but it was done by University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-...

I know I've felt that feeling. I'm not a teenager, but I can imagine the FOMO and loss of social clout a kid would feel not being connected in ways that their peers are.

My solution was to not care if I was missing out. Counterintuitively, it's not until you do that that you're free to find the life you want for yourself. Good luck explaining that to a 16 year old though, they're not there yet, they're not building the life they want, they're finding their tribe, and you have to be connected to do that.

Keep in mind that social media is pretty much the only outlet you have for social signalling as a teenager. Disconnecting from it at that age is social suicide.

Disconnecting as an adult is much easier/worthwhile because you now have other means of signalling.

They don't hang out in real life like we used to. TicTok or whatever is the house in the neighborhood all the kids hung out at.

That’s just incredibly dystopian and sad. I hope this is the start of a greater trend pushing back against social media. We’ve lost so much quality social interaction to apps. The mental health aspects of just stepping outside and making real personal human connections are huge.

Eh, as a “youth” (23) who wasn’t so long ago in high school, people still hang out plenty. They just document it more (for better or for worse. I suspect worse.)

I'm 35 and I'm telling you that you didn't/don't do it as much as we did.

From about 13 on we were trusted to just leave the house and go wherever we wanted on our bikes, little to no questions asked. City, rural, suburbs this was a pretty universal experience. One kid in the group might of had a early cell phone and that gave our parents more than enough peace of mind, but no location tracking and it would lose service enough that you didn't have to answer if you didn't want to.

You could meet dates at the mall without mom hassling you about them, you'd often work a part time job rather than playing soccer or similar so you'd have your own money. We were free. You guys grew up in a prison comparatively but since you haven't seen anything else it seems normal. It's also why you guys are less independent, you never had a chance to be.

(E.T. or another period film might be good to watch to understand the independence and agency kids had in this time)

Oh I don’t disagree, I just meant that it’s a bit overkill to say they/we don’t hang out in person at all. I do have fond memories of running Halo 2 with my stepsister when I was 8-9, and those sort of nights seemed to get less common as we got smart phones.

I am in a bit of a weird situation because I’m more independent than most (somewhat absent / workaholic family) but I know that’s the exception.

Take a look at the wealthier kids with stay at home moms. Zero privacy. She knows where you are and what you are doing at all times. Tracker in the phone, surveillance cameras at school and more often in the home, the school issued laptop logging every keystroke.

We had our own cash money. Parents wouldn't know specifics or "help you with budgeting". You earned it mowing lawns it was yours to spend. Getting a allowance on a credit card (in case he buys drugs!) isn't the same.

One last thing. Every night around 9 o'clock, the TV would ask parents all around the country "It's 9PM, do you know where your children are?" beacuse sometimes they would legitimately forget and not notice they haven't come home yet.

This whole thread is a bunch of boomers or gen X folks who are upset at the techno freedom that the youth have. These same boomers and Gen X are then advocating for taking away freedom of internet association.

Then you come here and write out a post explaining how the kids of today are living in a relative prison and back in the day you got all this freedom to go on dates at the mall that your parents wouldn’t approve of.

Your parents would have banned you from going to the mall if they knew what you were doing - and you’re also an out of touch boomer - and that’s not a comment about your age, but about your mentality.

I agree that calling it prison is over the top, but I also think your response is a bit rude and dismissive of very valid statements by the reply

Good. Rude opinions deserve even ruder retorts. Every time a thread like this comes up, I’m reminded that the average HN user fantasizes about licking boots, and that those who do not enjoy bootlicking are treated as pariahs.

Boomers trying to mass enforce parental controls via legislation is so bad for freedoms I don’t know where to begin. I wish I could do more than simply “be rude”. There is still not a way to punch someone through a computer screen, unfortunately.

No. A downward spiral of ruder and ruder retorts is what we are trying to avoid here.

It's very rare today, but some kids in some places really still do go out that much on their own.

Late 30s here and can confirm. Went until I was 16 with zero technology besides Yahoo chat, MSN Messenger and Newgrounds.com. Then got a flip phone which I used mainly for my pizza delivery job. Other than that, hung out with friends and did the dumbest stuff imaginable, not a phone in sight.

I saw a doc not long ago where a guy was in prison for 7 or 8 years - while cell phones and social media was in the middle of really amping up. He said the biggest surprise for him when he got out was seeing 3 out of 4 people looking at their phones everywhere he went.

That being said, I'll leave one of my favorite short movies of the sad state that we've come to as a society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QugooaNRnsk

Your comment reminded me of one of the best books I’ve ever read… Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck. He talks about what he calls the “backwards law” which is about these counterintuitive truths like the one that you discovered.

When I was a child I used the argument "because others do it" and mom told me to not look at others and think for myself. I understood the idea just fine.

The biggest problem I see is that we’re now essentially requiring ID to use substantial parts of the internet. So many business only have a Facebook page, Google maps has social features.

I already didn’t want a Facebook account just to see a businesses specials, now I’ll need to present ID too?

Certainly interested to see how all this plays out.

I’ve gotten by for the last several years without Facebook or Google (I do use a YT account, but not for anything meaningful). It’s annoying, but doable.

>I’ve gotten by for the last several years without Facebook or Google (I do use a YT account, but not for anything meaningful). It’s annoying, but doable.

I think the point is that the internet and particularly social media is now the de-facto town square. States are basically requiring identification to speak or criticize government in the town square. If you take a step back and look at it that way, it's grossly anti-American.

Imagine back in the day, if you had any type of meeting/gathering to discuss anything that might be related to politics, and the police were there to collect everyone's Id. AA meetings, computer meetups, hobby gathering, HOA meetings, etc. This is essentially that, except on a computer. Just think of the children!

It’s not a defacto town square though.

If anything, these services are more similar to shopping malls. And don’t be surprised when the mall cop throws you out for causing a scene, or just lounging about and not consuming enough.

1. You don't need an ID to shop at a mall.

2. The government doesn't tell mall cops what to do.

I can't reply to the other responder, but even if these are shopping malls... Those are already acknowledged as common spaces at least in California where most of them are headquartered. Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, it was held that a shopping mall was not allowed to remove students asking for signatures on a motion.

PruneYards was found not to be significantly harmed by the expressive activity, because the goal of the commercial activity is to sell stuff. But the goal of an online social media platform is to curate a coherent speech product, and allowing people to insert themselves unwanted into that product is a very significant imposition on the platform.

Also no one lives or eats or breathes on Twitter so the notion that they are exercising an online platform the same way they would exercise the park on Main Street does not follow.

Not to mention the fact that the entire point of the town square is that it is a place for discussion of the function of the polis with the citizenry of the polis. Online social media is a place to consume garbage from foreign actors and influencers.

>PruneYards was found not to be significantly harmed by the expressive activity, because the goal of the commercial activity is to sell stuff. But the goal of an online social media platform is to curate a coherent speech product, and allowing people to insert themselves unwanted into that product is a very significant imposition on the platform.

That is true but unrelated to the DeSantis law. The social media companies obviously don't want to kick kids off their platform considering they are a significant portion of their audience.

The DeSantis law states the government is mandating that social media companies ID everybody. This does have precedent though because governments require bars and food marts to ID young people for cigarettes, but it's different because they are not required to ID everybody. I'm not sure they are even required to ID people, they can just be prosecuted for selling cigarettes and alcohol to minors. I think the ID part was just the most convenient way to not get prosecuted.

Of course requiring social media companies to ID everybody will have a massive chilling effect on political discourse. That might be part of the objective or at least a convenient side effect.

It is related. One poster suggested that the online platforms (which are, for a number of reasons previously noted, not town squares) are actually more like shopping malls. Another post noted that shopping malls (in California) can be subject to requirements to allow someone else’s speech in their area of commerce.

But online platforms are not like shopping malls, because online platforms sell advertiser access to a coherent speech product, which is distinct from the sale of goods in ways that profoundly affect first amendment protection of their business.

>But online platforms are not like shopping malls, because online platforms sell advertiser access to a coherent speech product, which is distinct from the sale of goods in ways that profoundly affect first amendment protection of their business.

But the social media companies aren't the ones who want age verification and to kick people off their platforms, the government is. The companies want kids in their audience, kids want to be in their audience, many parents are fine with kids in their audience, it's the government of Florida who wants to ban kids.

Correct me if I'm misunderstanding but you seem to be arguing that social media companies should be allowed to kick people off their platforms, which would trump the individual's free speech. That isn't the issue here.

This discussion has gotten a bit convoluted. I apologize for not being clear. Original idea was that the government can’t kick every kid off social media because social media is the public square and kicking people out of the public square is wrong.

The reason why this argument is bad is that online social media platforms aren’t the public square. They’re not the public square because they are something else: a coherent speech product.

They are allowed to kick people off because they produce a coherent speech product.

But you are right, the fact that they are allowed to kick people off is not directly related to the fact the government wants to bar kids from using these sites.

Are you and I in full agreement now? I think we might be.

Thanks for clarifying.

>the government can’t kick every kid off social media because social media is the public square and kicking people out of the public square is wrong.

I think kicking kids off isn't the primary complaint. I think that to enforce kicking kids off requires social media platforms to ID everyone to ensure they aren't kids. That's the chilling effect. Fewer people will post their true feelings (good or bad), which lessens citizen discourse (which IMO is bad).

>They’re not the public square because they are something else: a coherent speech product.

How do you define a coherent speech product and what makes it unable to also be a public square?

Oh, apologies if ordering shifted. I was replying to another replier, but unable to do it on their actual post.

I'm not particularly rooting for this either. I am sympathetic that social media might be bad for kids, but this isn't the way

I think in the first couple minutes after posting, replies are disabled.

Even if it was the town square many actual town squares require adults to accompany minors. Sure enough if you had a bunch of unattended 12 year olds hanging out the cops would be called and parents asked to be parents.

Even worse would happen if you left your 6 year old wonder around the town square unattended while you went to a movie.

Except that's new too. When I was a kid, I could travel wherever I wanted without anyone calling the police on me. It was just normal for gangs of elementary schoolers to wander about. I'm a millennial, so it wasn't even that long ago this was a thing.

It's crazy. We've stopped treating children like children and started treating them like babies that need constant supervision.

And once again, it is literally safer now than when we were kids. By every crime statistic, it's safer now than ever.

The issue here has absolutely nothing to do with how it affects kids, it has to do with how it affects adults. Again: "States are basically requiring identification to speak or criticize government in the town square."

The fact that the legislation is intended to affect kids is irrelevant if the only legally permitted way to comply damages the individual liberties of adults.

>Even if it was the town square many actual town squares require adults to accompany minors. Sure enough if you had a bunch of unattended 12 year olds hanging out the cops would be called and parents asked to be parents.

What? Where is this the case?

This has become such a common trope that I think people fail to apply even a modicum of scrutiny: the internet is not the town square and whatever your idea of the town square is likely wrong if you think its as wild-west-y as the internet is.

Firstly, try to approach children in the town square while wearing a mask for anonymity; or try to hold up images of porn in your town square. You will not be there long, you'd likely be detained, and you'd likely be asked for identification.

Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town square? I have lived in several large US cities and several small towns. In neither was there any sort of common place where we all congregated to address matters of the town. At best, there are city hall/city council meetings where the public can speak but at least in my town (and I know of many others), identification is required to prove that you live in the town!

Even the founding fathers, when writing under pseudonyms, understood that anonymity and circulation was incumbent upon them to maintain, not that they were entitled to it because "town square."

To address your last point: this is not simply some ill conceived moral panic/think of the children type moment. Go try to host - as an adult - an AA meeting or "computer meetup" with children that happens to be held in the local adult toy shop. See how well that goes for you. At this point, we know children are getting approached by adults at a large scale on instagram, we know children are getting exposed to a lot of adult content on twitter, and on the spectrum between innocent HOA meeting and damaging to society as a whole, its clearly more towards the latter.

>This has become such a common trope that I think people fail to apply even a modicum of scrutiny: the internet is not the town square

Where is the majority of politics and recent events discussed? Where are new ideas shared and accepted or rejected? Where is this topic being discussed? Case rested.

>Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town square?

It's an international phenomenon, probably as old as civilizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_square

The rest of your post sounds like moral panic.

If actual politics reflected sentiment on the internet, US politics would look very different. The Overton window on the internet is very different from real life, there is tremendous bot traffic from outside the US, there are people with multiple accounts, and algorithms and "trust and safety" rules that promote certain views above others. You are confusing signal and noise. The majority of politics - that matter - is not discussed online, the majority of new ideas are not shared/accepted/rejected online - even in a business sense most founders know their cofounders personally, not from online chats. Case rested.

You idea of the town square is also outdated. Do you think the municipal government in Rome still meets at the Forum? And you did not address my point that even if it did exist as it did in whatever millennium you yearn for, would the behavior that is present on the internet be tolerated the same way? Was the Forum or Copley or Dock square known for adult men showing their genitalia to underage women? Your idea of a town square is antiquated and likely would not have tolerated the behavior you think the internet should just because its the town square. Case rested.

> The rest of your post sounds like moral panic.

Nice rebuttal there. If it's just moral panic, why does the data suggest that social media use its detrimental to adolescents' mental health and well being? Why is the effort to curtail social media influence on kids' a bipartisan effort in an increasingly partisan society? Even the misguided level of libertarianism you're probably advocating for understands that short of pure anarchy, there are some externalities governments have to address, chief among them are social media platforms that are evidently harmful to certain parts of society (young kids). Case rested.

"Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town square?"

Cities and towns in the US were once often built around town squares. Many cities have open public areas like this in Europe and South America where people can congregate. Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires comes to mind. Cities in the US haven't been designed around a central town square in a long time, but the term has stuck colloquially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_de_Mayo

Below is a link to William Penn's original plan for Philadelphia, where the city would have a five town squares, with one in the center of each of four quadrants, and the largest in the city center. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gary-Libecap/publicatio...

https://lauriephillips.com/philadelphias-five-original-squar...

Boston long had a number of town squares, many of which no longer exist, such as Haymarket Square. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_Square_(Boston)

My point is not that they NEVER existed, its that they no longer exist in the capacity most people mean when they use the term. As you mentioned, cities used to be organized around them. Most people now live in cities that are either don't have one at all or don't have one that is used in the way they were hundreds of years ago.

Furthermore, the behavior that was tolerated in the town square would not be close to what we tolerate online. And we don't afford kids the freedom in the real world that we do online. I am not sure why people think that requiring parental consent or age verification online is some sort of assault on personal liberty.

Requiring age verification online for adults is the only way to keep kids out.

And requiring identification to lounge on the town square is generally considered unconstitutional in the U.S.

I don’t know how to square this circle. Can you conduct age verification without requiring identification?

I think this again comes back to the idea of thinking of it as some sort of digital town square.

We don't seem to have an issue with the government requiring businesses to check ID for alcohol, tobacco, porn (in the physical world), and firearms. Movie theaters check ID for rated R movies if you appear to be under 17. In fact, a lot of online retailers of alcohol and tobacco now require ID to be verified at purchase instead of at delivery.

Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/etc are not the digital town square; the most charitable analogy for them is they they are merchants in the town square. And the rules should still apply to them.

For the most part, those real-world ID checks do not involve keeping a record, or a durable storage of what you say, or see, or listen to while you're there.

There's nothing preventing us from the law requiring the same for online verification. It doesn't have to be the case that Facebook or Twitter or whatever store any information other than at some point they did verify your age.

As to the other information, you're more making the case that online tracking should be illegal (which I'd agree with). For the majority of people, they are either unaware or uninformed about how to prevent online tracking to a sufficient degree. If you're signed into your Google and Facebook accounts and then surfing the web, theres a good chance you're getting caught up in cross site tracking. Hell, even if you don't have accounts explicitly, its not like Facebook isn't tracking non-users. In the real world, stalking is illegal.

Also, in my state (Washington), IDs now have barcodes on them. When I buy beer at the store, the clerk doesn't even look at my ID; he/she scans it and thats it. I'd hope the information about what type of beer and how often I buy it isn't being stored somewhere but I'm just hoping.

H.B.3 only prohibits these minors holding accounts on social media. They can still browse, as can anyone without an account and age verification. You'd be able to view a business's information, watch videos, etc etc etc, just not create your own.

It also has conditions for which sites are affected by this law. The site has to have doomscroll and already be popular with kids. Google Maps isn't what they're targeting.

Honestly, mixed feelings. I'm in no rush to show Zuck my passport but the flagrant grooming comments on every kid's TikTok account is enough to show there's a significant problem, even if this isn't the right answer.

How many social media sites allow you to do anything without an account? Twitter used to be wide open but X competely locked down. Instagram lets you click 2 things and then the paywall pops up. I'm not sure about Facebook but it isn't much better.

Without speaking to merits, the entire point of this law is to reduce usage by minors. So being able to do less without an account is a feature through this lens.

The question was about merits though, you can't just ignore the question.

How do teenagers find and discover businesses when they are locked behind a sign up wall for social media?

This is an unfair parallel, but it's like worrying about businesses who advertise on pornographic sites or on cigarette boxes. Allowing visibility to businesses who advertise on a certain platform could be judged (by society, law, and voters) to be outweighed by the need to restrict youth access to social media. There is a variety of precedent in society and law in restricting youth access to something that is otherwise deemed legal. Just because businesses advertise on social media (in my opinion), the decision to restrict access should not be altered by that advertising strategy.

They don't advertise on FB, they host their main web presence on FB.

That's like saying you go to Pornhub to buy Manscaped Hair Trimmers. You don't. They _advertise_ on PH, but that's not where you buy them at.

Why is everyone replying to me about ads? Who said anything about ads?

> How do teenagers find and discover businesses when they are locked behind a sign up wall for social media?

Why is this even a problem?

Oh no, businesses can’t target advertising directly at children?

Who said anything about advertising?

This is about businesses using Facebook as their main website. Where do ads come in?

Are teenagers not real people or something? They don't buy things or shop?

Kids can “find businesses” the way they always have

Like, with ads? That you were so against above. What's wrong with them going to a businesses online presence?

It will be interesting for businesses like restaurants that don't have paper menus but have you scan a code that opens an IG with their menu in an album. Frankly, I applaud the state for eliminating this use case.

Twitter required a login long before the rename or Elon owned it. He actually removed that restriction for a while before reenabling it.

And with some simple div removal, IG doesnt require a login to view content. This is true about a lot of the paywalled sites.

That doesn't sound true to me... Idk specific policies, but my experience was that I was never logged in to twitter on my desktop and I was never login-walled out until recently under elon.

edit: https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/tech/twitter-public-access-re...

> People without a Twitter account or who weren’t logged in used to be able to scroll the platform’s homepage and view public accounts and tweets. But as of this week, when such a user opens the platform they are met with a screen prompting them to sign up or sign in to Twitter.

Ive never had a twitter account. And I was definitely not able to view most content during the pandemic.

from 2021: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/pa6dra/twitter... and from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615371

A plus of this law would be if this would force social media sites to stop locking down read access behind a sign up wall.

I think the barrier to entry with creating a new account on each site right now is low when no ID is required - so social media sites lock everything down.

With the new friction of requiring ID, it could be harder to get users to create accounts so locking down everything won't make sense from a viewership access perspective.

I don’t have a Facebook account, but browse business Facebook pages without trouble pretty often.

What I’m really unclear about is whether providers are required to use an actual ID to age verify. Does anyone know?

The bill summary on the Florida senate webpage says:

> Such commercial entities must verify, using either an anonymous or standard age verification method, that the age of a person attempting to access the material harmful to minors satisfies the bill’s age requirements.

It sounds to me like “anonymous age verification method” could just mean that the website asks how old you are? What constitutes verification here? That sentence makes it sound like they can choose to use whatever feeble method they want.

At face value this law seems like political points being scored by passing a widely popular law that changes very little in practice (bumping the minimum age from 13 to 14).

Anonymous verification could be something like OAuth. Government run or certified probably. You'd need to provide an ID to OAuth provider once, but the actual service requesting verification would get as little as your age and email.

I just wonder if they even have to go that far. I didn’t really see much of a standard of what is age verification defined.

> Anonymous verification could be something like OAuth. You'd need to provide an ID to OAuth provider once

That doesn't sound very anonymous to me

The last thing we need is to force everyone to have ID to “protect the children” before I can go on to a site on the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_papers,_please

Which is not what anyone is calling for.

What? That's literally what we are talking about!

No, we're talking about stopping children having social media accounts.

And how do you know they're not a child?

Bars do it by having you show an id.

Online pot dispensaries do it by having you upload an id.

Texas expects porn sites to do it by having you upload an id.

How does Florida expect a site to do it?

This is a legitimate question that I want the answer to. Presumably "check this box" isn't going to cut it. So if it's not the most common way to enforce an actual legal restriction, then what is it?

There's really no need for ID checking. Most porn sites already self-regulated by marking their content adult with meta tags/headers.

Parental control software picks up on that. [1]

Social media could do the same thing: make a social media adults-only meta tag for parental control software to use.

For the parents that care, and use parental control software, the ID laws won't stop their kids running into porn. The porn their kids are going to encounter is going to be on non-porn sites like twitter or reddit (or small sites that don't care about these laws anyway).

Maybe we needed a bigger push for more awareness or better parental control software but the ID law push is weird and unamerican to me.

[1] https://www.rtalabel.org/

> Parental control software picks up on that. [1]

That's client side. This law specifically makes this a server-side issue; the service cannot let a minor make an account.

How do you do that without ID?

By not having this law and doing it client side. My opinion is the law is bad.

This law might have never come up if we had better parental controls at every level of the software and hardware stack.

I'm a parent I have parent controls setup on my child's devices but it's very hard to dial it in properly and cover all the bases. It should be far more straight forward to manage than it is now.

I'm obviously pretty tech savvy and I would say 99% of parents are not going to get this right.

I can’t speak for PCs or Android devices. But iOS devices already have parental controls built in as do Macs

iOS parental controls are awful. The only way to get any decent control for my concerns that the moment is using the downtime features all day long. Effectively I've told iOS that he should be in bed for 23 hours and 55 minutes a day. It's ridiculous and extremely limiting.

Microsoft's parental controls are sort of ok. I also have separate control software for Windows and I have controls at the router. Of course, none of things can talk to each other to create a coordinated plan (say giving X number of screen time hours per day).

iOS controls effectively block adult sites and you can manually add sites to block and not allow apps being installed without your permission. What else do you need?

Some control over when certain apps can be used.

That has nothing to do with “protecting the children” from sites you don’t want them to see or apps you don’t want them to use at all.

But does have everything to do with parental controls.

Besides the easiest way to know what you kid is doing online is to watch them -- much easier to do if I control when they use it.

A solution to these issues is for the child to not have the device in the first place. A desktop computer in a central place with eye on it can go a long way in managing online activities.

As a parent, as a former child, as someone that grew up with computers in places just like you describe, let me say, in my personal and professional experience… lol

You’re right about parental controls, especially apple ScreenTime. I’ve used computers almost my entire life, I even work for Apple, and I still resorted to calling tech support about it. As far as I can tell, they don’t actually do anything useful, and instead just get in the way.

I do disagree that a technical solution could have avoided laws like Texas. It’s not about “protecting the children”. It’s never about the children. It’s just censorship. It’s just easier to go after a porn site than it is a library.

My sibling in the universe, we are talking about an actual LAW. WRT Texas, a law that is on the books and enforced TODAY.

Get informed.

I've just answered in a sibling thread.

I'm not asked for ID when I order a drink. The bartender takes a look at my ugly mug and makes the call: I'm [painfully] clearly over 25.

Facebook has more than enough processing power to have an AI watch you reading a script straight to camera for 30 seconds to work out a rough age. If you're within 5 years of their idea of 18, surrender that ID, the same way you would if you were in a bar. Don't want to? Don't maintain a social media account. Don't have that drink.

The alternative is setting up a government-maintained 0Auth-style hand-off. They know who you are. The social media site could open a verification ticket, you authenticate with your government and they sign your ticket without the social media site getting any of your details. The trade-off with that is cost and your government now knows you're on TikTok. For some people that last one matters.

If you paired these laws with strong PII protection (see GDPR) to stop social media sites storing this stuff indefinitely, using your data against you, it might be an easier sell.

Thank you for answering.

You have a bit more faith in a technical solution working at scale than I do, but I have to point out, that after repeatedly claiming that no one wanted an ID scan, your proposal involves an ID scan.

I also have to point out, that PII and GDPR protections are meaningless here. Under a government mandated censorship regime, the threat is the government, not some data broker somewhere.

The reason I have faith in a pure-technology solution is because setting up ID-linked database APIs will take time and querying it will cost social networks real money. When this was discussed in the UK, we were looking at 10p per check. That's $1m for Florida alone plus engineering to get it in.

They have innumerable GPU cycles they could redirect to a ML solution, and more importantly this is something that ML and facial recognition systems have been doing in prosumer-grade hardware for well over a decade. If I could set something up to do this in an afternoon, I believe Facebook probably could too.

My proposal only involves ID if you look young enough that the AI isn't certain or you don't want to upload a video. It's cutting out ID checks for 99% over 25yo.

But I do see this more about child safety than a censorship regime. Social networks are poison, even to adults. They're designed to trap us there, keep up "engaging" and not wander off to another platform. Our ability to make an informed choice about whether our kids are being damaged by them (and the people on them - who we have no control over) is seriously diminished. I've seen the stuff my daughters' 8yo friend uploads and the comments would change your mind. Yes, I'm biased, but I don't think that makes me (or this) wrong.

How do you imagine that will be enforced? Perhaps by... ID?

Do you have another method to prove age? One that doesn't require ID, and can be implemented as of today?

> How do you imagine that will be enforced? Perhaps by... ID?

Emphasis mine. It's that that which I'm disputing.

This law does not require you to have an account to go onto a website. It is a law that requires you are age-checked to hold an account on social media platforms. These are different things.

Holding an account —broadly speaking— allows you to post, like, comment, follow and be profiled in an enduring fashion. Some of these can have life-long implications that 12 year olds aren't equipped to evaluate. How many adults can identify unhealthy social media usage and do something to stop it?

I don't know how age verification will work in practice. Checking a government ID is one way but if you're handing that off to a third party service, it's expensive. They don't need to know who you are for certain. A similar check is when you buy alcohol. If you look young, you're asked for ID.

When I buy alcohol, I'm not because I look like a man with kids nearing his forties. It would be far cheaper for Facebook to have an AI watch a video of you speaking to camera, with ID as a fallback. Many social media platforms are ingesting gigabytes of our faces every day so. They probably already know the rough ages of their users.

But going on a website (eg Youtube) doesn't require you have a profile. Going on Facebook business pages doesn't require it. If anything, laws like this might mean that things like Instagram have to be more open to preserve their reach. Not a bad outcome, IMO.

When you buy alcohol, it’s very easy to see whether they are taking and storing your picture. You can also buy alcohol with cash leaving no digital footprint.

And is AI the new blockchain that will magically solve every problem? And most children over 14 don’t have government IDs either.

If you don’t want your kids to be on Facebook, use parental controls. It’s the parents responsibility.

I live in Florida for context. The same government officials talk out of the left side of their mouths about “parental choice” and now this law says children can’t be on social media even with parental consent.

Parental choice exists where parents can make informed choices.

You don't know how much their child is being affected by platforms that have been designed to be addictive, that go out of their way to spur conflict and argument (sorry, "engagement"), and that have so few parental controls that it's near impossible for a parent to actually vet what's going on, who's interacting with them.

You're not even allowed to give your kids alcohol. There's clearly some precedence for protecting kids from their parents' inability to make informed choices.

And ML models for detecting age have existed for a long time. It's not magic unicorn dust. It's just one way to avoid this ID stuff that everybody is upset about.

Then educate the parents and tell them about parental controls.

But would you be okay if I used that same argument about why open computing platforms are bad because adults don’t know enough about computers to avoid malware and ransomware?

Pornhub just blocked Texas. We are very much using children as an excuse for big government.

Big government forced licensure upon motor vehicle operators because early on they demonstrated a tendency to cause societal harm. There is a place where libertarian ideals have to be curtailed for the greater good.

You didn’t answer the question. It’s one thing for the government to have your ID and tied to a physical activity. Do you want Facebook to have a copy of your ID? Do you want the government to be able to ask Facebook who said something that offended them for your real ID?

There have been cases where the cops arrested someone for criticizing them on Facebook

https://theconversation.com/mocking-the-police-got-an-ohio-m...

The cops also raided a newspaper for criticizing them

https://kansasreflector.com/2023/08/12/in-marion-county-news...

We have to be free to criticize the government anonymously

The law appears to require Facebook offer "anonymous age verification" through a third party (so ID is not shared with Facebook), and requires that third party must not retain or share PII used for verification.

For reference: https://flsenate.gov/session/bill/2024/3/billtext/er/pdf

The Texas porn law similarly required no records be retained, with pretty steep penalties ($10k per record) for noncompliance.

What are the positive effects of blocking Pornhub?

“Think of the children!!!” Has been used for a very very long time to enact terrible laws and quietly remove rights. It is everywhere you look.

Right, definitely wouldn't want that. But do we just have to accept the negative impact the internet can have on children as a necessary evil then?

So you would be okay giving your ID to Facebook or any other site before you can access it?

No, I wouldn't. I'm just wondering if we have to accept the consequences for children or if there's some alternative solution.

How do you propose that social media sites verify your age without showing them your ID?

By showing a third party their ID that doesn't share the actual ID with eg, Facebook. That third party would then share their status with Facebook. Facebook doesn't get the ID, but does get to verify that they're of age (or not).

So now the government still has a way to match a user with a real person and we have to trust a third party company with our ID?

And I should have to do that as a 50 year old guy with grown kids for “the children”?

How about if parents are concerned about their kids, they should use the parental controls that are already available.

And this isn’t theoretical for me. I live in Florida.

If we have to accept the negative impact of bullets in our childrens' bodies from spree killers and cops as a necessary evil to preserve the Second Amendment then yes, we should accept the negative impact of the internet as a necessary evil to preserve the First.

Kids-only internet (moderated by child development phds, idk) you need specific, cheap hardware to access. Less walled garden, more sandbox. It wouldn't be a place for entrepreneurs.

Registration and access maintained at the county level or smaller so that community standards and relationships shape adoption and use.

Low age cutoff with actual adults trying to connect put in jail and on a list.

I’m struggling to parse anything you said.

I'm arguing for a completely separate kindernet. While on packed public transportation.

Who is going to pay for it and who is going to decide what’s appropriate? If the government decides, what happens when a party is in control of government that has opposite views than yours?

> You'd be able to view a business's information, watch videos, etc etc etc, just not create your own.

so...everyone - that Facebook or whatever considers to be in Florida - has to provide ID to post, then?

This is not true! I was looking at a hair salon and bakery recently. Both, being run by millennials, have nothing but a google maps listing and an Instagram account. But I don't have one and after looking at a few photos of cakes and hairstyles, it gives me the boot and asks me to sign in to see more! Adding mandatory government ID to that is crazy.

Anything that contributes to funnel friction for those wreckers is a social net positive in my book.

They sound like incompetent business proprietors. When did having a website become something exclusively for old people? Millennials are in their 30s and 40s.

> When did having a website become something exclusively for old people?

It's more that having a website never became a thing for many businesses in the first place. 30 years ago they might have had a listing in the phone book. Nowadays that kind of business might have a facebook page, or more recently an instagram account. Creating a website (even with something like wix) requires a level of skill and effort above that.

They're just being cheap. Facebook is free (and "everybody has Facebook") whereas Wix and Squarespace are $12-$15/mo for businesses.

For a lot of businesses, a website receives way fewer views than any one of their top-3 social media sites.

I’ve seen a lot who are still paying for a site but rarely bother to update it. All the traffic’s on Facebook.

It is not just 15$ a month. You need to pay someone to develop the website in the first place and then deal with all kinds of issues that eventually arise (updating the underlying framework and/or getting hacked and dealing with the consequences, solving random stuff like expired SSL certificate, etc.).

Idk how something like a cafe would necessarily benefit the business to have a dedicated website. A facebook (or google maps) page presents relevant info such as location/hours/menu in a predefined schema, so neither the owner or the customer need to worry about formatting it (or understanding the format).

Their competence is measured by their success, not your opinions. And it turns out that in many professions, an insta is the thing you need for success.

If you don't like it, that's your problem, not theirs. You're part of a small enough group they don't care about. I'm not sure how that's an age question in the first place, though. The "being run by millenials" throwaway by GP is just... well, at best, sloppy thinking.

There are GenZ businesses websiting, there are boomers insta-ing. You pick the tool for your niche.

Well, I went to the bakery and I can attest that they are indeed run by millennials. I will argue with the technical ineptness point made earlier though. If you can figure out how to make videos with music and edit in animated graphics using the tools Instagram or whoever else provides, you can figure out Wix's website builder.

Why do you need them to have a website? A thing that has no traffic, no discoverabilty, needs to be updated, paid for, etc?

All the information is already on google maps and IG/Facebook.

They have 2-3 billion people in their target audience.

Well presumably a website would be accessible to everyone, account login and government ID or not.

I guess that’s my point though. isn't it a very rational BUSINESS decision to go some where 80% of people and probably 99% of their target market are on these platforms that provide them with free distribution? Outside of the moral qualms of that 1% of people that don’t have a social media account or use google?

Sure. Would you also remark on their hair color? Shoe size? First letter of their name? Because those are likely about as relevant to their choice of advertising medium. It might be true, but there's no relevance.

And the point isn't if Wix is hard or not. It's that they answered the question "where do we need to advertise" for themselves, and just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's wrong.

Placing your online marketing behind an auth wall (Insta) is the definition of incompetence.

Instagram gives you like half a scroll.

Facebook is more generous.

That's kind of on Instagram for forcing you to log in—I certainly never use the site to look at anything. Google maps certainly doesn't require this.

Regardless, I won't bemoan the demise of either business. We need something simpler to drive traffic.

> I'm in no rush to show Zuck my passport

I agree, but I think your problem isn't Zuck, it's with passports.

Government issued licences aren't fit for purpose any more. They were when all you did with your paper drivers licence is show it to the police, but now they've become a form of ID you show man+dog who gets to scrape a whole pile of into from it that can be used to track you. For example, they can follow your passport number or drivers licence to connect a series of what should look like unrelated transactions.

As an example, now when a car rental company wants to know you have a valid licence they demand a copy of it. If you have an accident they use the copy to prove they verified you are licenced to drive, if you do something illegal they can hand over your ID so the police can chase you down. FIDO / WebAuthn / PassKey shows how those things can be achieved without leaking all the information on the licence. It can hand over a one time token saying you have a valid licence and signed by something that chains back to a public key held by the government. The token reveals nothing more than that to the car hire firm, but should they hand it over to the police they can decrypt it to identify you.

These tokens are useless if stolen. They can't link you to other transactions and don't identify you in any way, and yet are far more secure than a bunch of unsigned pixels. In other words unlike a copy of a passport, mostly harmless.

> don't identify you in any way

That's a critical flaw to those in power.

Hard agree. I think making significant progress on this problem would be time consuming - but ultimately a significant win for society.

Hi Seph, any updates on the paper on Replayable Event Graph, looking forward to reading that paper.

Its happening. My coauthor wanted to make some updates before sending it out to people. I'll send you a draft soon, I promise! Its just coming together slower than I'd like. Always slower :S

> gets to scrape a whole pile of into from it that can be used to track you

I can't help but feel your argument is with data protection [and the broad lack of it in the US] rather than government-held databases.

I have a couple of online government authentication methods. There could easily be an AVS API where a website kicks me off to to my government, and they sign a request for age verification, all with very little cost and fuss. That obviously causes uproar from people who think my government doesn't suspect I touch myself when they're not looking.

And a suggestion I've made in a couple of other sibling threads is having an AI watch you reading a script in realtime. I had to do this for a mortgage application a few years ago. Probably cheaper than a government API, and a high success rate on 25yo+ similar to facial-only checking in bars.

> I can't help but feel your argument is with data protection [and the broad lack of it in the US] rather than government-held databases.

It goes deeper than that. Recently in Australia we've had two data breaches, one from a Telco [0] and another from a credit card company [1]. Both were required to collect ID by law, so they gave you a portal to upload photos of drivers licences, government medical insurance cards, credit card and so on. In both cases they leaked the lot.

To say they were unpopular was an understatement. Perhaps 10% of Australia had to get new drivers licences. The were hauled up to front senate committees, CEO's fell on the sword. A lot of political theatre in other words, but while this "take a copy of a government licence as a form of ID" madness continues it will keep happening.

In other news, social hacks against the government electronic ID for their website were used to collect around 1/2 a billion in fraudulent payouts (tax refunds and the like) [2]. And a few years ago the tax office was done for $2B or so for ID fraud waged against our VAT collection. [3] That one was perpetrated by thousands; the instructions went viral on TikTok.

We live in a digital world now, where it's easy to take a copy of any bag of bits. Relying on ID's that don't mutually authenticate and vigorously protect the information they do hand out is downright dangerous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Optus_data_breach

[1] https://asic.gov.au/about-asic/news-centre/news-items/guidan...

[2] https://theconversation.com/the-500-million-ato-fraud-highli...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/13/ato-s...

But current trend is websites closing up for browsing without an account, because of AI.

I suspect more businesses will create a separate website because of this law, so you'll have even less reason to use Facebook or whip out your ID.

> I already didn’t want a Facebook account just to see a businesses specials

Hopefully this will make that problem less prevalent.

Imagine if all those sites weren't social but could just provide the info. And business would have regular website and not parasite Facebook page...

I don't bother with businesses that only have a Facebook account when I'm searching. I'm sure there are dozens of us doing the same.

Apple, Google or any other trusted provider could do anonymous attestation of being over a certain age. Apple already has the framework in safari to attest that you aren't a bot.

Google is the last company I would trust with that kind of data

All of this pretending to be concerned about children is really about doxxing and creating lists of political undesirables.

I'll be the odd guy out and say it should probably be illegal to attempt to enter a contract (AUP, privacy policy, etc) with a minor anyway (for a lot of reasons around exploitation), so I don't _really_ have a major issue with this at face value.

I know the devil is in the details though, so kinda curious what the actual provisions are.

The alternative is a free internet, where we don't need accounts to do things, because we're not building or storing advertising profiles on users. Hmmmm... imagine that.

Plenty of other goods and services are used by children, even targeted at them, without them needing to enter a contract.

I think the OP was saying that having minors agree to a social media sites terms and conditions is them entering a contract. So if you're against minors entering contracts, its logically consistent to also be against holding minors to a websites terms.

> I think the OP was saying that having minors agree to a social media sites terms and conditions is them entering a contract. So if you're against minors entering contracts, its logically consistent to also be against holding minors to a websites terms.

In which case we should ban children from using game consoles, computers, cell phones, ISPs, TVs, or anything that else that comes with a ToS/AUP/T&C

Since when can children agree to legal contracts? don't you have to be 18 to get a cellphone plan or sign a contract with an ISP?

Yet children have cell phones and use the internet right? Nothing (as far as I know) will stop a child from walking into a walmart and buying a pre-paid phone or a TV or a computer but all of those things will force you agree to their terms.

How enforceable all of that is legally would be up to the courts, but that's true for social media sites too. If a 15 year old signs up for a social media site they're forced to agree to terms that might not hold up in a courtroom. None of that protects the child from having their data harvested, sold, and used against them for the rest of their lives.

If we agree to ban kids from using social media on the basis of them not being able to legally enter into a contract, we'll have to ban kids from a whole lot more that social media since so many things in our lives require one. Even things explicitly made for children.

> but if we enforce the law, then companies will have to stop taking advantage of children!

That sounds pretty good. Maybe companies targeting their products and services at children shouldn't attempt to enter illegal contracts with them?

I'd be better to outlaw the data collection and exploitation than to tell kids they can't use cell phones or computers or social media and televisions. No need to limit that to just kids either.

Children aren't allowed to play slot machines either and that's what TikTok (and Youtube Shorts, etc) sure feels like to me.

It might feel that way but what's the real difference between TikTok and watching TV? Society has always restricted children's access to specific content but now we're restricting children's access to specific mediums regardless of the content itself.

Why is TikTok or YouTube shorts not a valid way to consume media?

It's a bit like arguing graphic novels are acceptable to children but short comics are not.

The difference is massive.

Your weird neighbour who has a feet fetish would never get to be a TV star, but he can amass 50k followers on TikTok, and request feet pics via private messages to them. Including underage children.

Now multiply that by ten thousand.

TV, by nature of being a group effort and holding a sliver of a monopoly for your attention, had a natural content filter (based on societal standards, for bad and good).

I don't watch foot fetishists but I watch a lot of content made by people who would never get on TV on subjects too niche to ever get on TV.

Also, if you want learn how to do anything, you can find someone online that will show you how to do it.

> Your weird neighbour who has a feet fetish would never get to be a TV star

Look up Nickelodeon and Dan Schneider my man.

Haha, I was sure someone would make a comment like this. The point is that that his fetish would not be the show’s content :)

Well… there are some examples of them filming some very inappropriate stuff with the child actors [0]. There are other examples but I’m not on here to talk about this anymore, I just happened to learn about this subject recently and it was topical. I think it’s disgusting anyone takes advantage of others, TikTok stars or otherwise.

0 - https://youtu.be/nc-ZT4Ty05o

I mean, that’s also kind of the point. Something like that on TV that generates worldwide commotion, gets people fired etc, is actually very mild when put near the stuff children can find online.

It’s also more of an abuse on the actors, and might pass unnoticed by young viewers, while a lot of the content on tiktok and YouTube is actively harmful, trying to indoctrinate weird ideas or stimulate inappropriate behaviour. With an audience of other kids and creeps cheering on and competing for likes in the comments. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how much more dangerous social media is.

The point is his fetish is in the show's content!

Although, still, a few exceptions aside doesn't invalidate your point. TV being a single group effort is much better than thousands of individual voices, what could possibly go wrong with that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

The greater risk isn't weird fetishists but the social media companies themselves who push products designed to be addictive, manipulative, and exploitive in ways that TV can't be (although it's increasingly trying to catch up)

Replace that with books and written content on the internet, which has been a thing for almost 30 years by this point (like a lot of fanfiction on the internet).

> what's the real difference between TikTok and watching TV?

One is a heavily regulated medium where people spend millions of dollars and work together in teams of hundreds. It's content is overseen by numerous regulatory agencies before it airs. Tons of powerful people stand to lose a lot of money if anyone screws up and sneaks porn onto the news - even a nip slip on live TV can become a major scandal that's remembered years later.

The other relies on a team of inconsistent, overworked moderators to delete a deluge of inappropriate content in a vaguely timely manner.

Are we willing to lock all humans into an antiquated medium for the sake of this control?

I ask this as someone who now watches only a tiny amount of television now. I watch a lot of content online and even create my own content. The only reason we need overworked moderators is because anyone can be a creator now. I don't think you can put that genie back in the bottle and I don't think it's necessarily better if you did.

> even a nip slip on live TV can become a major scandal that's remembered years later.

And only a few decades before that you couldn't show two adults sleeping in the same bed.

That's not the problem with TikTok. All the extreme stuff is filtered out. The problem is with content that moderation is fine with being of seemingly low value. Unfortunately, because of how the app and its algorithm works, there is no good way for an outside researcher to observe and report the full nature of the content of the platform.

Graphic novels and short comics are a finite medium, they have a beginning and an end. There's not a very practical way to doom scroll away your entire weekend with comic books. You will eventually run out of comic books or run out of places to put them.

I desperately wanted to gamble with slot machines when I was a minor. When I reached 21, I had lost all interest in them.

Would you mind expanding that? I always assumed that renting, lending or buying anything constitutes a contract technically.

If you want to be really pedantic, everytime a minor makes a purchase in a convenience store, that's technically a fulfillment of a contract. We still consider this a normal interaction and we don't consider the purchase null and void because one of the parties was underage.

I was thinking more about sports clubs, or things like the scouts or church groups. Sure, the payment side requires parental supervision but none of them operate under dracionan "accept our legalese or we won't let you play"-style rules. There's a lot of difference between "we have an implicit contract that's based around common values" and "we deny you access unless you agree to be exploited".

I felt that the blanket statement "it should probably be illegal to attempt to enter a contract with a minor anyway" was implying that therefore young people should have no agency. That's probably not what the GP meant, but I thought it needed stating explicitly that we do expect children/teenagers/adolescents to gradually take more control over their own life, and that we do expect society to allow for that.

Generally speaking, in the US, contracts with minor (< 18) are voidable, that is, at any time the minor can break the contract. This creates a situation where no one would ever contract with a minor, which is obviously bad (how is an emancipated minor supposed to rent an apartment?) so there are statutory exceptions where the contract will be enforced.

The minor gets a co-signer for the apartment.

Why would anybody rent to a minor otherwise, regardless of the contract breaking issues. They are unlikely to have much credit history. To say nothing of the maturity / responsibility and income (+ wealth / cash savings) problems.

The whole point of emancipating a minor is to empower them with legal decision-making power, in particular the ability to earn and retain wages.

Furthermore it's really hard to interpret your sentence with a meaning other than 'poor people do not deserve housing,' which I have to assume is not your intent.

how do you perceive privacy in such a world?

>The alternative is a free internet, where we don't need accounts to do things, because we're not building or storing advertising profiles on users. Hmmmm... imagine that.

Sure, so long as you pay for the service you're using. 10c per HN post, 50c per facebook photo.

That's a false dichotomy. The internet has and has always had plenty of sites (including social ones) that didn't charge money or spy on users. Just because many website would prefer to exploit their users for profit today, that doesn't mean that the internet can't exist without every website creator stuffing their pockets with cash.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

If you're not paying for a service you are the product.

It just happens that for a bunch of old/small sites you were the product that the admin consumed to boost her ego when she banned you.

There's no doubt that a lot of free sites were put there because it gave something to the creator. Maybe it gave them an ego boost, maybe they felt a sense of accomplishment for creating something that became popular, or they got warm fuzzies from sharing something with others that they have a passion for.

Free internet sites that don't exploit users don't require pure altruism. I assume nobody is paying you to contribute to this site, and I assure you that I'm not being paid for it, yet here we are. Sharing and offering something without hurting anyone or taking from them.

Considering the real cost, it may be more accurate with 10^-5c per HN post, 10^-4c per Facebook photo (numbers made up). But they're a pain in the ass to pay, so we depend on people who do pay them in bulk, that is, the advertisers. But if we can invent any other method to properly trade this small amount of value, I think we can finally do away with them.

This is how web3 operates. A post cost a bit of gas (usually a penny or less) and that pays for the infrastructure (data processed and stored in the smart contract. Each user paying for their own actions prevents the need for advertisers.

Also conveniently prevents having to hear those pesky poor people complain.

Back to work!

If you're too poor to pay a penny for a post you don't really have anything of value to add to a conversation.

> 10c per HN post

Apparently some people haven't heard about Stacker News (okay it's more like $0.0001 per post, but anyways...)

That's an interesting thing regarding this law. This law is entirely unenforceable on sites that don't make their revenue by knowing exactly who you are. Any social network that allows pseudonymous accounts and doesn't require real identity information can easily be used by a kid, just click "I'm over 16" when the dialog pops up. But Instagram or Facebook is going to have a hell of a time convincing a court that they didn't know that Brayden who is posting pictures from school wasn't actually 40, or that he was in Illinois when all his contacts are from the same town in the Florida panhandle. So laws like this actually further the concept of a free internet without constant tracking, companies that track you have no plausible deniability.

I don't think this is really about protecting minors, or hurting big tech, or scoring some short term votes, or anything like that.

I feel it's more likely that the long game is ultimately about de-anonymizing the Internet.

This particular objective is a solid plausible explanation of so many initiatives over the last few years. Perhaps not full public de-anonymization, but at the very least to make it easier for things like CALEA to exist in these spaces as well. The public is constantly shown techniques in whodunnit TV shows where the good guys can instantly look up an IP address or other identifying log entry and associate it with a name/address/etc.

IMHO, the plan is to make Business As Usual untenable and make it cheaper and financially safer for tech companies to give in and identify everybody as a survival mechanism. When its safer to record a passport/realid/etc as a legal defense then at some point it'll be done.

After that happens then it's easy to plug in something like CALEA. The public is already being primed to accept it with the benefits being constantly shown on the likes of CSI/NCIS/etc/etc/etc shows.

Of course, from a profit perspective, it certainly wouldn't hurt that all this valuable user data that is being being compiled is finally cross checked and validated.

Or maybe I'm completely wrong and there's no ulterior motive and there's nothing more to it than politicians trying to be seen to be doing the right thing. Hah! I'm way too cynical for that.

Although I don't support it, would the internet be a better place with people being identified? For this to be a constructive discussion, can we assume companies have a proper and secure way to validate identities and store your data? A lot of the extremism we see online is because people hide behind their keyboard. I sometimes wonder if the internet as we know it and social medias pervasive influence would be much different if people were less anonymous.

Please convince me I'm crazy or provide anecdotes that suggest this to be a terrible idea.

I grew up with internet access in the early 90s and have been behind a keyboard ever since.

edit: Downvotes are not for disagreement, please provide constructive discussion to a reasonable question.

People will be even less likely to tell you their real opinions online if a data breach can uncover the real identity behind all their posts

> Although I don't support it, would the internet be a better place with people being identified?

Better for who?

Any system secure enough that a person could never face consequences for posting something unpopular would also be incapable of accomplishing the goal of censoring things online that are considered "bad".

You say that even our current pseudo-anonymous communication enables "extremism" but any system that would prevent it could be used to stop a whistleblower, or a protestor, or an atheist, or anyone else with an unpopular opinion. I don't see that as making the internet better, and I question how much it would even stop the things most people today would agree to want abolished.

I have seen little correlation between absence-of-extremism here on HN and how much information people provide about their identities. You can see that brand new throwaway accounts are more likely than others to post extreme rants, but I don't see much difference between year-old accounts that are totally anonymous and year-old accounts that link to personal web sites, GitHub profiles, LinkedIn profiles, etc.

Our local newspaper used to allow people to comment on stories with a Facebook account. People who were using real names and had publicly posted enough information that you'd be able to quickly locate where they lived frequently went on extreme rants.

The newspaper eventually just got rid of Facebook-powered comments, but I see the same behavior (terrible comments under real names, easily linked to employers/homes/schools) on the neighborhood's Nextdoor discussions.

> A lot of the extremism we see online is because people hide behind their keyboard.

Maybe this is true, but we also have to think about the perfectly reasonable things we nevertheless wouldn’t want pinned on us. Political opinions, of which many of mine are half-baked and I am writing to test with other smart people, but I don’t want to necessarily be associated with them forever. I don’t want to worry that simply saying tech workers should unionize will impact my employability in the future.

> would the internet be a better place with people being identified?

No.

Marginalized groups __need__ their anonymity to be safe.

Should a teenager in Utah be doxxed by a message board where they're working through their gender identity?

What about a kid in Georgia that's working through whether or not they believe the religion they were raised in?

How about a wife who is beginning the research process and asking questions about whether what she's experiencing at home is spousal abuse or not?

Anonymity protects those of us most in danger.

You bring up a good point. How were these problems addressed before the internet?

They weren’t.

Kids and wives were beaten into line.

Anonymous phone lines. There was (and still are) many services you can call up anonymously for help. If you’re worried about it being traced back to your phone then you’d just go for a walk and use a pay phone.

The internet made it a lot easier though, and lets people get a lot more help from a wider variety of services (and communities).

A lot of things were not recorded, there were no mass video recording, no cell phone location tracking, no ALPR, low credit card use with high cash usage and what was recorded was in the bottom of some basement cabinet of some government office.

Libraries had very strong privacy protections culturally and legally.

If you lived somewhere with good transit and didn't have a papers please id culture, you could also travel without any identifying information on your person!

If you had half decent opsec, the only thing to worry about is people you know noticing you somewhere, and even that is reduced by driving somewhere 1 hour away.

We have lost a lot of effective privacy today.

> Although I don't support it, would the internet be a better place with people being identified?

I don't believe so.

> For this to be a constructive discussion, can we assume companies have a proper and secure way to validate identities and store your data?

What?! No, we absolutely can't assume that. In fact, good default is to assume that data stored will be eventually compromised with high probability. Assuming otherwise is like believing in some magical backdoors in cryptography that only "good" guys can access and other such nonsense.

> I sometimes wonder if the internet as we know it and social medias pervasive influence would be much different if people were less anonymous.

Social media as we know it today mostly stems from FB which has a real name policy. Don't think FB is much better than others (by any measure that interests me at least).

>Critics have said the bill violates the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protections for free speech and that parents, not the government, should make decisions about the online presence of their children of all ages.

It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children, especially early teens from using social media. This law should make it easier and it would put the work on Meta, Snap, Tiktok, Pinterest, Twitter to help parents.

I'm personally glad that I grew up without social media but I worry about the kids growing up now. The amount of random junk young kids are exposed to on social media is worrying.

These critics have no understanding of the law. We’ve been making exceptions for children for decades at least, probably since the beginning of the republic

I assure you I have an understanding of the law. This is such a a rude and preposterous assertion in bad faith.

This is a law mandating ID verification for all children and adults.

If you require controls for everyone below a certain age, you de facto require controls for everyone of every age who does not prove they are over the minimum age. In other words, even if you can legally discriminate against children, my rights to speak anonymously as an adult are being taken away because if I don't show my ID, I will be treated as a child who has fewer rights.

We can disagree on the merits, but please don't imply that everyone who disagrees with you is ipso facto an idiot.

Indeed. We've been round this when Facebook etc (most recently Glassdoor) instituted "real name" policies.

I'm rather confused about HN's response to this because normally when a media platform voluntarily tries to censor certain kinds of bad behavior there's a massive backlash here, and now there's seemingly overwhelming support for simply removing a whole category of people from being able to speak at all, along with whatever real ID policy gets put in place to make it work.

It's still early in the day. I expect this thread to get more diverse attention over time.

> a whole category of people from being able to speak at all

Hot take but I can go without the opinions of children.

Well, yeah. I can go without the opinions of any underrepresented group. (A lot of theoretical computer science work in my field was done by pseudonymous children, but it's not like I need that to live.) Doesn't mean they can go without me hearing what they have to say.

What theoretical computer science work is being done by middle schoolers? Are you a Minecraft YouTuber?

I was thinking things like complexity theory. The Minecraft kids are generally more on the applied side of things: software engineering, usability work, that kind of stuff; and afaik they don't really publish in ways that are easy to cite in academia. (I'm only familiar with that sort of thing in passing.)

But you have that for many things in the states.

If you subscribe to cable, you need to prove your financial record, which excludes most people under 18. if you want to buy the special channels, you have to go through an extra set of hoops.

Buying actual real media porn in stores or mail order, require(d) some level of age verification. If it went to a minor, massive fine and or a criminal record.

You need to prove your age to drink(or buy) alcohol and drive a car, and vote. Minors are treated differently in most common law countries.

> It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children, especially early teens from using social media.

What are you talking about? Parents can use on-device controls, you can lock a phone down in many ways. There will be whiz kids who can get around these, but those few whiz kids can also easily get around any controls via legislation with VPNs.

It doesn't require a whiz kid to get around the absolutely terrible implementation of parental controls on iOS. Based on the number of bugs in ScreenTime (TikTok restricted to 15 minutes, but on the same screen shows 2.5 hours of use that day) I'm half convinced the feature is just parental control theater.

Not speaking from personal experience. My kid is only 4.

Your argument seems like exactly what my parents would have said about me spending so much time on TV, computers and electronics instead of studying, playing outside, sports etc.

Almost exactly like your last paragraph.. “I’m personally glad that I grew up without infinite channels on TV, computers and its games, cell phones and your SMSes. I’m worried about your generation. You guys are exposed to a lot of junk and things that waste your attention.” - Dad.

Yet, here we are….

May be kids of now will just need to be educated about the real impact and not be treated as if they are in glass houses?

I think there are magnitudes and cliffs for this stuff.

TV --> has quality control, professionally done, goes through a team of editors/creators before making it onto the screen

Early internet --> Mostly harmless content, can find dark stuff if kids look for it but it's pretty hard to find. More dangerous than TV but not too bad.

SMS --> just chatting with people you know. Not afraid.

TikTok, IG Reels, Youtube Shorts, Snapchat, Twitter: Good luck to you. Your kid is going to see a ton of deep fakes, edited images of unrealistic body proportions that the influencer won't disclose, heaps of radical and extremist views, undisclosed sponsorships masquerading as advice, targeted ads that anyone can buy, etc.

The magnitude is much higher now - hence I think laws need to come in to make it easier for parents to get back some control.

Go ahead and try to teach your kid who is going to spend hours each day seeing hundreds of videos each day - probably tens of thousands in a year. What are you going to do? Watch 100 Instagram Reels per day with your kid and explain each and every single one? As an adult, even I'm easily influenced by this stuff.

You make a fair point. I think you have won me over philosophically. However, there is still the pragmatic and realistic approach to consider. Personally, I think moving to a world where internet content is gated behind ID checks is a terrible and horrible precedent to set that is going to have ramifications far beyond simply protecting teens who are under 16.

As a parent of teenagers who are falling into this trap right now, it is something I am gravely concerned about. I am no tech, lightweight, and blocking and even regulating. This stuff is pretty much impossible. Short of helicopter parenting your child at all times. Nor do I think that sort of heavy-handed regulation is necessarily healthy, although that depends very much on the age in my opinion.

But what does a world look like where every website and app has to, for liability reasons alone, assume that everyone is underage before proving that they are not?

Also TVs since 2000 in the US were all required to support v-chip which allowed parents to set restrictions on content. Getting around v-chip could often be somewhat complicated. Meanwhile it is usually pretty trivial to get around parental control software on computers.

My parents couldn't switch inputs on the TV, there's zero chance they could configure a v-chip without my help. Most of my friends' parents were the same way. I don't think this technology had the impact you think it had.

> Early internet --> Mostly harmless content, can find dark stuff if kids look for it but it's pretty hard to find. More dangerous than TV but not too bad.

In the early 90's the dark stuff was mixed in with the porn. If you were looking for porn on the internet before it was available on web browsers, aka on usenet or anonymous FTP, you got exposed to the dark stuff.

And I'm fairly confident that a large percentage of teens using the Internet in the pre-WWW age were looking for porn.

as a parent you have all the control. why does your kid need a tablet? why do they need a smart phone like at all? these devices did not just magically materialize in your home, the tooth fairy didn't put them there. you chose to plop your toddler in front of a screen because electronic vicodin was easier than parenting and then you chose not to lock down their devices with the abundant parental controls you are given and then you decided you couldn't be assed to teach them basic internet safety habits or how to develop healthy skepticism and that seeing isn't always believing. really the only thing your children have been '''exposed to''' is your own laziness and utter unwillingness to offer them direction. the world will continue to exist whether we like it or not, and some day our kids will have to live in it just like we do. we can either prepare them for what's really there, warts and all or we can hide them away only toss them to the wolves when they turn 18 with the delusion that this somehow preserved their innocence. i personally believe giving them the grace of a childhood to learn how to deal with the bumpy parts of life is a much kinder option.

Your look back fails at VHS tapes or home video though.

It also fails at abusive or addicted family members.

I understand what you are getting at, but to inject some nuance:

TV, print, radio, music and to a lesser extent games are all subject to some level of industry or statutory content regulation.

For example, in America, you're very unlikely to have a kids TV channel suddenly switch to videos of people being killed in industrial accidents. new media, not so much.

Watershed, age constraints and company ending fines existed (and in some cases still do) for violating those rules.

Large new media companies, such as facebook, youtube and tiktok can literally serve porn to kids and not have any legal ramifications. If a cable broadcaster knowingly broadcast frontal nudity before watershed, it would be fined. (yes, cable TV has less restrictions) but thats the point, regulation has not kept up with the pace of change. that has been a deliberate decision.

My kids are >5 < 12. They aren't allowed on insta/tiktok. They can have youtube, but its only when supervised. even then its 1/3 chance that they land on something toxic as shit.

The world has changed, and the guard rails that we had as kids have been removed. There is an argument about freedom of expression, I get that. But we need to think about whether its right to allow large corporations to profit from showing horrific content to minors. (adults, I don't give a shit, do what you want) The problem is, I'm not sure of the best mechanism, with the least bad outcome.

25 years ago us kids were watching viral content on the internet that wasn’t even acceptable to go on youtube then or now. Still today, we are now your young doctors and lawyers and young business executives, despite all the quite disturbing viral content that characterized the early 2000s internet. I think we did fine and I think the kids will be alright too.

Who is us kids? I assume you’re talking about 4Chan? I wasn’t watching what I’d describe as disturbing viral content 25 years ago.

25 years ago most people didn't even have a broadband connection in their home much less any kind of mobile data plan.

25 years ago kids didn't walk around with challenging to audit handheld computers. The computer, if your family had one, was that one big thing shared with the whole family that an adult could pop their head in and see what the child was up to.

That some kids (an incredibly tiny fraction) did have unrestricted access to the internet and turned out fine isn't indicative of the general population of kids having this kind of exposure and being fine. If in 1999 you had internet fast enough to really download many many hours of videos without being audited by a parent you were probably the 1% of 1% of 1% of child populations. A high percentage of households didn't even have internet at all. In 2000 only 1% of US households even had broadband internet.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...

I did too, but I would gently point out that you had to actively look for it. something rotten was a known site for that kinda stuff. You only went there if you were doing "illicit browsing" shall we say.

It was pretty difficult to stumble over a video of something visceral. Moreover, the internet wasn't real when we grew up.

The internet is real and omnipresent, filled with the mountains of clickbated bullshit, and only ever three videos away from some sort of porn(if you're lucky).

We had chatroullette too for our more sporadic visceral disturbances, also live leak existed then.

You did not have Chatroulette (2009) and Liveleak (2006) 25 years ago.

SomethingAwful.com and rotten.com were two separate sites, as a historical note.

sorry yes, thank you for the correction.

Just look at birth rate, depression, etc.

You will see we are in a dead end.

I don't think this law will change the trend unless there is major concerted effort.

Boys have access to so much porn and gaming that they are checking out of real life. Girls have their problems too with social media.

Porn and gaming? Really? Boys had this in spades for 35 years. Longer if you count the pinball wizard/hustler magazine under the bed era.

There's a world of difference between a 90's Hustler magazine and near infinite modern internet porn. They're practically incomparable.

One smugled magazine in the 90' are now replaced with infinite video of increasing hardcore stuff delivered to the phone in the bedroom.

You really can't speak for everyone. You can maybe say this particular cohort is fine despite seeing some of this content while young, but certainly not because of it.

And 40 years ago kids were watching bootleg copies of Faces of Death. Yes, kids get to that stuff. The problem is FoD doesn't even hold a candle to the manipulative shit that social media does to kids.

It was not all that easy to get a copy of Faces of Death back then, so it was something you might have saw once maybe twice but that violent real death before your eyes was not something that you ever became de-sensitized to because those visuals were exceedingly rare by the scarcity of the content at the time(at least in the US). So that morbid curiosity itch was scratched and then you moved on. Short of the few weird kids that watched that shit over and over, you probably never watched the whole thing. I know I think I watched 10 mins back in the day before it was turned off and we went out to find some beer instead. Now, real violence and death is a search term away and available every minute, hour, and day.

But agree…even that exposure to violence now pales in comparison to the amplification of the negative peer pressures that kids today experience due to social media. At least back in the day when you were away from your peers you could escape it and gain respite. Now its constant.

There’s some survivorship bias here. Not everyone who was exposed to disturbing content is unaffected or can move past it so easily. And in 2024, it’s far more likely to encounter something you had no intention of seeing.

It’s worth thinking about the social climate right now as the long tail of the last 25-30 years of technology advancement. Mass shootings are so common now they often don’t even register on people’s radar.

These effects are so complex that we’re still trying to figure out how to measure them, but we should take seriously the power and danger of the instant wide distribution of the worst elements of humanity.

I grew up on the old Internet, and made some of my most important friendships using it. It shaped who I am today, mostly for the better. But I don’t think we can let nostalgia or even the many benefits blind us to what the Internet has become or the real harms that come along with those benefits.

> And in 2024, it’s far more likely to encounter something you had no intention of seeing.

Strongly disagree. I haven't stumbled on "goatse" level shock imagery in years. Sure you might encounter stuff you had no intention of seeing, but that's only because you're being funnelled into link farms or other for-profit crapware flooding the internet. It's very rare to stumble on something disturbing.

In the last year I have seen (on facebook no less):

various levels of war crime

the killing of people at close quarters (with the last sound that they made, which still haunts me)

A sniper killing someone taking a poo.

These were nestled in amongst memes, which were fun and engaging. None of them had content warnings.

goatse wasn't all that shocking to me, because he is very much alive. 2 girls one cup is at least a ramp into skat, rather than straight in.

Now, if a 16 year old saw that, I'd probably not worry too much, I wouldn't be happy. But if my 10 year old, or 6 year old saw that, I'd have a whole load of emotional clean up to do.

Goatse is tame as fuck by modern internet standards.

I don't think the main problem with social media is the occasional inappropriate content.

The main problem is that most of the "appropriate" content is soul-sucking, biased, addictive and empty of substance.

> most of the "appropriate" content is soul-sucking, biased, addictive and empty of substance

sounds a lot like tv

We carefully vet what our 6yo watches on TV. You're right - not much passes muster.

Or really all other media. If you think print isn’t also biased, addictive, and lacking substance you need to read less nyt and more chomsky

While a lot of this can definitely sound like an old man yelling at the sky, tv compared to scrolling tiktok, is like caffeine compared to crack cocaine.

imo there's a difference between goatse type momentary shock sites that we grew up with and social media that pervades every waking minute of a kid's life. Yea, the former is gross, but the latter seems like it has real lasting psychological ramifications with regard to popularity contests, body image, etc. all the things that kids already struggle with, social media turns up to 11.

You're criticizing the lack of moderation. So let's make a law about that!

Adults can be traumatized, too. Making this about children has us putting up barriers in the wrong places.

I've seen the First Amendment used as an argument against the US government determining what should and shouldn't be moderated by private companies operating on private infrastructure serving private citizens. Unless we're talking about unprotected speech?

You've seen an argument, therefore I'm making it? That's not how it works.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that was your argument. That's not how I meant for you to interpret it.

I meant to get your opinion on whether the First Amendment would create a barrier for what you're proposing: government mandated moderation of protected speech on private platforms. You're talking about legislation and where to place barriers, so I thought you'd be interested in discussion. Sorry.

I think that private companies shouldn't own the public square. So long as we allow corporations to encapsulate social interaction, we will continue to fail at moderation.

I don't think that law is a really meaningful avenue to fix this problem. I do think that aggressive anti-trust action could help a lot, though. If we do want to use law, then I think the focus should be on punishment for facilitation of harm. We should be able to prosecute Facebook for hosting fraudsters and failing to moderate harmful content.

As it is, a tiny number of companies hosting the social activity of billions of people, and those companies have utterly failed to accommodate that reality with proportional moderation. The failure of Facebook to adequately moderate has already lead to genocide.

My greater dream is to replace centralized social networks and content moderation with a decentralized network of curated attestations.

> May be [sic] kids of now will just need to be educated about the real impact

Education about the real impact will not happen if there is profit to be made in forsaking education.

I think the empirical evidence is fairly clear, actually.[1][2]

Having struggled with various forms of screen addiction myself, I find it sort of odd that a lot of people are so laissez faire about giving children the most addictive device ever created.[3] Whether or not this law is a good idea, I think it's incumbent on parents to monitor and limit screen time and access to social media. Which is difficult! When my wife and I are tired, setting my daughter down in front of an ipad is the easiest way to get a break.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23522...

[2] https://jeanmtwenge.substack.com/p/yes-its-the-phones-and-so...

[3] Sure, it's not technically "the device," itself, but rather what it makes possible.

It's risky to describe the claims of social studies profs as clear empirical evidence, given the history of the field.

Twenge makes some unscientific arguments in her blog post, like constantly conflating correlation with causation despite her evidence not being able to show that. She also seems to think that if she knocks down a series of counter-arguments, then that means that her own argument must be correct. Given that Haidt's identical claims already turned out to be based on very poor quality evidence [1], their argumentation must be examined carefully before rushing to action.

Still, assume for a moment that it's a correct causal inference despite the major flaws in their evidence base. There's another tricky aspect to this. The Twenge/Haidt argument is really only about teenage girls. Although Haidt is basically honest about this (see [2]), Twenge is not. The opening of her article you cite talks about teenagers in general, but the first figure only shows data for girls and women. Then the second figure is even captioned "Figure 2: tech adoption, teen depression" but the legend actually says "Depression, girls". A few paragraphs later she's making claims about "individuals" whilst providing evidence that's once again specific to teenage girls. Her article is full of sloppy conflations like this.

Anyway, needless to say, neither politicians nor academics are willing to only ban social media for girls. This would upset the left so the argument morphs seamlessly into "social media should be banned for all teenagers" which isn't a story found in their data. This punishes boys for the mental health problems of girls, but is that just?

There's also a more subtle logical problem with this argument. It assumes that teenagers are a fixed group, and thus any change in their behavior must be due to some immediate alteration to their environment. But it's not: "teenage" is a sliding window that people constantly pass through. In other words it's possible that these depressed teens have always been somehow messed up, and simply aged into the categorization they're looking at. By implication the true answer could be found in earlier periods, even as far as back as changes to childrearing practices in the late 80s/early 90s rather than something that changed specifically in 2012. One theory posits that it's something to do with the rise of extremely early daycare for infants (e.g. for children less than one or two years old), and they also have a variety of correlations to bolster their case.

It may be that social studies academics simply cannot answer such questions.

[1] https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide... "Haidt's compendium of research does point to one important finding: Because these studies have failed to produce a single strong effect, social media likely isn't a major cause of teen depression. A strong result might explain at least 10 percent or 20 percent of the variation in depression rates by difference in social media use, but the cited studies typically claim to explain 1 percent or 2 percent or less. These levels of correlations can always be found even among totally unrelated variables in observational social science studies. Moreover the studies do not find the same or similar correlations, their conclusions are all over the map."

[2] https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epi...

It definitely appears much worse for girls, but afaict, depression has risen in boys as well, just by not as much. See graphs here: [1]

So if social medial is harmful in general, I don't view prohibiting it a "punishment" for boys; perhaps like less of a benefit? Regarding your second point, I imagine the data would provide some clues. If the kids that are now teens were always more depressed, I'd imagine that we'd see more pre-teen depression ~3-8 years ago. I haven't looked into it closely.

And I grant that social science statistics are often problematic -- I imagine it'll take a while to really know what's going on.

[1] https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa...

But the rise in depression is only amongst some people, not everyone uniformly. Yet nearly ~all teenagers use the internet and something that can be described as social media. So it'd be punishing the majority who can use something responsibly and even get enjoyment and benefit from it, for the lack of self control of a minority (who could easily just log off but won't).

All that assumes the link actually holds, indeed. The two articles in Reason are persuasive that it doesn't hold though. The social media discussion in that case is just a distraction that stops people figuring out the real causes.

> May be kids of now will just need to be educated about the real impact and not be treated as if they are in glass houses?

The problem with this argument is that TV had ads and while they are manipulative, they are absolutely no match for the shit that Meta, YouTube, etc pull. Kids (and quite obviously lots of adults) simply do not have the ability to deal with that.

tv, computer, radio, social media, and more broadly the internet, are mediums of communication and distribution. what tv content/substance did you grow up with? is that in and way comparable to the content/substance kids these days grow up with? the ban is on the medium but the import is on the content. too much junk on the internet these days. it doesn’t help that (1) they’re way cheaper to produce, and unfortunately (2) highly rewarded (by the platform owners) for their ability to keep users glued.

until it’s possible to have strong and reliable filters, the only way to protect tender minds is through controlled exposure.

Agree and disagree. Kids can't really understand the negative impact of the things made to alter their mind, and since their parents are responsible for them, it's their job not to just explain, but to do their best to limit or participate in their usage. This is only difficult if your children are not in your presence 24/7 (public school, hanging out at malls, etc).

> This is only difficult if your children are not in your presence 24/7 (public school, hanging out at malls, etc).

So you're just saying it is difficult.

It's the paradox of being a parent that is commonly hoisted upon you.

If you hang too close you're a helicopter parent. If you aren't around and they do something wrong idiots scream "where are the parents!?"

What if it was the responsibility of parents to make sure their kids didn't smoke cigarettes, but it was legal for stores to sell cigarettes to kids? Responsible parents could tell their children they are forbidden from buying them, explain all the reasons why it's bad, and then kids could just walk into a store and buy them anyway. Putting it all on parents doesn't work, parents aren't capable of supervising 24/7 and it isn't reasonable to act like they are or should be.

That's a fair point. The more I think about it, I can see the argument for protecting someone against a known bad thing at a point when they cannot comprehend how bad it really is. The magnitude is different from watching TV, porn magazines, or video games. However, I do worry that the earlier list can be gated because of their physical nature. However, Kids are going to end up being exposed to Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and whatever else unless one cuts off Internet access altogether, at which point the losses pile up more than the wins.. There is no easy solution than to admit this problem will exist, and we talk often to the teenager and give doses of reality however possible.

Lol at the infinite channels on TV part really highlighting.

As an adult, I don't have cable, I use an antenna. Yes, I have streaming some streaming services.

As adults and/or parents we can make decisions that help our kids (and they might help us too)

I also use Adblock.

The TV argument is the same as devices too; We had one family TV growing up; I still refuse to have a TV in my bedroom.

In conclusion, seems like we've hit the generation where our parents used TV to parent and so now we don't know how to parents -- or, for many people, be.

Did you get exposed to far right propaganda, dehumanizing women, incitations of violence, practical suggestions of suicide, cartoons about rape followed by pregnancy and a miscarriage, or similar content on TV when you were a kid?

This is the kind of shit that’s everywhere on YT now, and your kids will stumble upon (father of one here). The “faces of death” stuff we had access to once in a blue moon is not even close.

So you grew up without AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo accounts, web forums and MySpace? Or for the generation before that, Geocities and Usenet?

The current form of interactive online platforms may be flawed but banning teens from using them is not the solution and any effective method of enforcing such a law is likely to run afoul of the 1st Amendment. Besides obviously the Tinker v. Des Moines precedent about how teens have the right to engage in non-disruptive speech at school which is probably sufficient to overturn this if the Supreme Court recognizes the precedent.

Under COPPA, the "parental consent" requirement for under-13s to sign up for online accounts turned into a de-facto ban because no parent or web site wants to deal with mailed permission forms. The informal "don't ask don't tell" policy works pretty well though because it functions as an IQ test to keep the kids who are too dumb to figure out that you're supposed to lie about your age (as I did to be able to use Geocities when I was 10) off of the internet. A "parental consent" requirement is effectively a ban which is what it was in the original law that DeSantis vetoed. But it sounds like this was a major priority for the Speaker of the state House so it was going to happen in some form possibly over the governor's veto in a worse form if he completely opposed it.

>So you grew up without AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo accounts, web forums and MySpace? Or for the generation before that, Geocities and Usenet?

Both.

I grew up in a time when social computing was when we geeks of ages 13-15 brought each others Computers to a house and challenged each other to write games on another device.

Back in the days when I had an Acorn Atom and friends would bring their Spectrum, Oric—1, TRS-80, Commodore 64 etc.

You forgot IRC.

Most the bad stuff I saw on the internet ~99/2000 was from IRC.

I had the unfortunate idea to nick myself TheGiver after the novel at 14.

The Bill of Rights restricts Uncle Sam. It doesn’t guarantee minors the right to use a private computer system.

The Bill of Rights applies to state and local governments. The Supreme Court has been pretty clear about that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...

That doesn't change the equation unfortunately.

I know there is this big push to limit screen time for kids.

I give screen time more as a reward for hard work and getting chores done.

I use the screen time feature on Apple devices to limit my kids screen time and the type of apps they can access.

It doesn’t work though. Using instagram web bypasses the app limit. If you set a website limit, it only applies to Safari. If you block TikTok, they will find video compilations in Spotify, which shouldn’t have to be blocked. It’s a mess.

ST can work by time as well as app. Recommend revoking app install privileges. No one should have third-party corporate surveillance apps installed anyway.

Sorry, I don’t see how that comment answers mine? In my experience it’s impossible to properly block anything that is also available as a web app (which is most of social media apps).

You block app by time or uninstall it, and black/white list the site.

I solve this with an absolute limit on time to 15 minutes a day.

This blocks even educational apps.

The funny thing is Facebook already has restrictions on serving ads to and collecting data from kids under 13. They have a popup that asks, "Are you over 13?" at which point my then 11 year old daughter clicked yes.

This is feel-good legislation and is not realistically enforceable. People can argue about it all they want, it won't change anything because it's not enforceable.

>It requires them to use a third-party verification system to screen out those who are underage.

We'll see how well that works.

As a parent, I’m concerned about social media, and it has been more or less impossible to stop my teens from using it. They were jailbreaking and using VPNs and bypassing my parental controls a lot earlier than I expected. I did notice that whenever my kids didn’t have access to phones and games for several days for whatever reason, they were less grouchy and more willing to engage with us and do family or social activities.

That said, one thing my teenagers clued me in to is that these efforts to require parental involvement by law have some underlying motivations that are not being said out loud. One of them is to out kids to their parents early and cut off online support for teens going through gender identity issues, especially gay and trans kids, perhaps under the assumption that gender identity is a choice and that online activities are somehow causal.

Considering the suicide rates among teens with gender issues, and the growing number of physiological indicators, I’m not sure cutting off all online support for them is a good idea. One of my kids does have gender identity issues and has considered suicide, and as a parent that breaks my heart and scares me more than anything. It was surprising to find out about the gender issues, and it started coming out around 14, so it’s easy to jump to conclusions that social media is a bad influence. But in retrospect, the signs had been there for a long time and we failed to see and acknowledge them. Our kid said that online support is what kept her from attempting suicide even earlier.

Yeah, what a weird spooky coincidence that someone like DeSantis would make a move that’s cut off kids’ means to countermand their parents’ information lockout.

Send them to a private school, or even better, homeschool, control what kind of people they make friends with, keep them busy with church and Sunday school and bible study, burn the books and defund the public libraries, control what music they listen to and what shows and films they watch and the games they play… and, of course, control their means of communication.

Heaven forbid your child ever be exposed to anything that might make them question the reality of this little garden of Eden you’ve imprisoned them in.

I’m not in favor of the DeSantis law for the above reasons. You appear to be against this law as well, so I’m a little baffled why you’ve turned that on me and imagined a whole lot of stuff I didn’t say. Am I correct in deducing that you are not a parent yet? I’m not religious, but this law we’re commenting on is coming from a group of people that are pandering to religion, and this law is a direct part of that effort.

I didn’t try to control my kids “information” other than when they were young trying to make the really nasty stuff not come up first or by default or on accident. They weren’t security conscious, because they were kids, so white/black lists preventing malware, phishing, and viruses seemed prudent. They also didn’t have a ton of self control, and games are infinitely more tempting than school work, chores, and even self-care and sleep, so screen time limits are useful. For example, we had multiple pee in the pants and on the couch accidents because our kids were so focused on playing games they wouldn’t stop to go to the bathroom. Google used to have a bad habit, when “safe mode” was turned off, of taking an innocuous search about human bodies and returning very hard core porn. We had an accident with one of our kids who searched carefully and incrementally for “naked ladies on the beach” and got back a list of pictures and videos of anal sex gang bangs. This was with a kid younger than 10, and the very week this happened to us, Google announced in a press release that it would start returning results that were more closely aligned with the literal search query, and it was instantly obvious to us what they meant and why they needed that.

So anyway, this is all to ask, maybe cool your jets so you’re not attacking people who might otherwise agree with you? Parental controls have legitimate functions that are not about cutting kids off from the world, and if/when you have kids you will come to understand it and probably try to use some parental controls too. Parental controls are not on & off; the term represents a whole spectrum of goals and options. Even the most absolute and strict use of parental controls, which is rare among any parents I know, is automatically less of a totalitarian option than disallowing any screen time or mobile device use.

I'm an exmormon who grew up in Utah. I have seen a very significant amount of positive engagement over social media with people who desperately need it.

My state's version of this law is to force ID-verification for porn sites. For that stated purpose, it isn't even remotely effective. But what about convincing a child to admit to their parents (or Mormon Bishop) that they watch pornography? That's where it gets truly concerning.

If there were anything else that harmed over 90% of kids while potentially helping a remainder we’d generally prohibit it.

I’ve known and worked with folks facing mental health issues over the decades and usually these kind of issues come from within. The idea that instagram is a cure-all for teen self-harm is not supported.

Anecdata—we knew a teen recently with very supportive parents and a smartphone and it didn’t stop a suicide attempt. Direct intervention did.

I did not even suggest that Instagram helps with teen self-harm at all. It’d be great if we could discuss this without straw men or sniping argumentation. My kid found support from friends online, at a time when she felt like she wasn’t getting the right amount from the people in her life, which to my chargrin, included me. Direct intervention has helped, and online activity alone wasn’t going to stop everything. Direct intervention alone wasn’t going to stop everything either, and it’s important to know that the wrong kinds of direct intervention can make the problem worse. (I’m worried the DeSantis law is the wrong kind of direct intervention, for example.) Since you work with people with mental health issues, then you know full well that neither my story nor yours is a one-and-done situation. A single intervention is never the start nor the end of the story, and preventing suicide for people with depression & dysphoria is a continuous effort with lots of different forces pulling and pushing.

That was a unimportant random example, congrats for running with it. Should have been in quotes I guess. Change to “social media.”

> It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children, especially early teens from using social media.

I'm trying to decide whether it's "extremely easy" or "extremely difficult" for parents to stop their children from having a cell phone. One the one hand, all you have to do is not spend money and not buy a phone, easy. And yet, almost every kid has a cell phone, so evidently it is hard for parents to say no.

This law will put social media in the same situation. It will be "extremely easy" for parents to simply not give permission, but, like cell phones, I think most kids will end up having social media accounts anyway.

I had a conversation with a mom recently where she wanted my input on her media choices because she thought what I was doing was cool and admirable.

It all fell apart when she realized that she'd have to yank the XBox, the PS*, the Switch, etc.

Her kid, and all of the other entitled ones with endless access to everything on the internet, are utterly intolerable when they come over -- until they go outside with my kids for a few hours and come back in with their heads reset!

A Playstation or Nintendo Switch has no internet browser, or access to any social media.

Phones are not that expensive anymore. Kids can buy used phones for $100, or get hand-me-downs from friends. They can use them on wifi, or if they are able to get a prepaid SIM they can use them on cellular also.

From personal experience with a teenager - you can't stop it. They get a device from their friend, they are easy to find. They keep them hidden, and you only find them by being a total snoop and seeing new devices popup on your wifi network. Or, they only use them at friends houses on their wifi, etc.

I don't think half the people commenting in this thread have even one single clue about any of this, from real world experience. You can do everything right on your end, but they sit with their friends on their devices when not around your house.

Yes, but I still disagree somewhat. I’m reminded of flip phones in prison—one scene in Orange is the New Black is funny… kept behind tile in the toilet.

Seeing things at friends’ house is expected. We used to look at Playboy magazines for example. But that’s still scarce and better than knee-deep in porn 24/7 at home.

Why should companies be forced to help parents supervise their own children? It's ironic that DeSantis is all about parental freedom yet wants to turn the companies into a nanny.

He's a leader in the party of big government -- but I doubt he would admit it.

At least the other side doesn't hide the fact that they're in favor of regulations.

He's a leader in t̶h̶e̶ a party of big government

FTFY

In the US, at least, all significant parties are parties of big government...

There's degrees, though. One party wants government to be so large that it won't allow you to get certain forms of standard medical care, after all.

Should liquor stores be required to stop children from buying alcohol?

Should 7-11 be required to stop children from buying pornography magazines?

Yeah it is difficult being a parent. Welcome to parenting and adulthood. The solution isn't more big government and a massive police/surveillance state. It's no wonder Stumpy didn't get too far in the primaries, people could spot his deep state tendencies from a mile away.

This trope that kids are more vulnerable to the influence of social media is dangerous. Media literacy, social media literacy, and internet literacy are critical for all ages, as without it you could be 10 or 40 and be equally influenced by some "influencer" you watch daily videos from. There are plenty of adults who react just as equally as a child would. Age does not guarantee maturity or competency.

One thing I worry about, as a parent in Silicon Valley, is that my kid will somehow procure a phone and hide it from us. My kids don't have enough cash to go buy a new phone without us noticing, but used phones are pretty cheap. Also, a wealthy friend/boyfriend could buy a phone and pay for cellular (MVNOs are quite inexpensive these days), which would defeat router-based monitoring. My kids are currently too young to do any of this, but I foresee it as an issue in the future.

There’s a ton of old devices sitting unused in drawers that aren’t worth the time to sell.

> parents, not the government, should make decisions

Now do alcohol, cigarettes, adult bars

People might see it as harsh but looking at reality and the hard numbers collected about the gigantic negative impact it has on kids and teenagers this is the right move, would even push it till 18.

Why 18 and not 25?

because under 18 is not an adult legally speaking, and 18+ is?

Again, not the best argument given that the drinking age is 21. Additionally, children can volunteer for the military at the age of 16. So there's clearly a range, "legally speaking".

Leaning on existing laws isn't really the best for these things, because existing laws may be flawed. Would prefer to base it on scientific insights, but we don't have much relevant for this stuff.

So the real answer is "We don't know, and different states will try different ages and see what sticks, what people will accept."

> Additionally, children can volunteer for the military at the age of 16.

In the US, under 18, only with parental consent.

*Unless emancipated, which also often can happen at 16.

Florida allows 14 years old to work 15 hours.

A lot of states are removing restrictions for under 18 workers.

Also, drinking age is 21.

I do wonder at what age social media is supposed to stop being destructive to mental health. Based on my experience, I'm also inclined to think the answer is never, but there's too much money to be made to stop it.

Or 21 like some drugs...

Because you have to draw the line somewhere, and 18 is considered when someone is capable of their own adult decision making.

This is the number we've been using recently, but it's been different in the past and there's no reason to keep using it, especially when we have data showing that 25 is the age your decision making faculties are generally fully developed

When I was a kid the argument was “if you can be drafted and sent to war you should be able to vote”. The state is still going to want those young able bodies for their militaries. Raising our age of adulthood to 25 seems unlikely to go over very well.

Because at 18 people are responsible for their own actions, and restricting them after that is unreasonable and contrary to personal freedom.

There's a consistent factoid going around that brains aren't done developing until the age of 25. It's frequently used as an argument to restrict young people.

Looking at performance by age in fields like math and music, declining brain plasticity seems more like a reason to implement the carousel from Logan's Run

Might as well raise the age of majority to 25, if the brain isn't finished developing they're obviously incapable of handling personal freedom!

I'd unironically support raising the voting age in the US to 25. I was an idiot when I was 18 and had no business picking a leader of any kind.

There's something to be said for waiting until people have actual life experience.

I have the opposite take you have. There should be no restriction on voting age at all. Everyone possesses the right to have a say in the direction of the government that governs them.

Riiiight. Because four year olds have a strong grasp on current events and deserve a say, and totally wouldn’t just become an extra vote for whomever their parents are voting for.

Yep, I understand the practical issues with my position. But I can’t ethically condone saying “you have no voice” to a fellow citizen, so I prefer no restrictions.

I can’t ethically say that policy should be decided by people whose primary concern is the frequency of nap and snack time.

There are plenty of unethical outcomes available in the "let babies vote" scenario, to weigh against the allegedly-unethical scenario of having a voting age.

Indeed there are. There are many hills I’ll die on, and while this isn’t one of them, I do find it deeply uncomfortable to so clearly deny a whole category of citizens representation.

Why so uncomfortable though? We routinely stop children doing all kinds of things, for exactly the same reason (lack of maturity in decision-making).

Maybe that's an opportunity to reevaluate those restrictions rather than make the argument that because restrictions exist that one is as good as another.

It's about as logical as saying, "we put people in jail, therefore it's ok that you go to jail." The nuance and reasoning is the point.

Alright let's do that. Is disallowing children from driving vehicles or purchasing and consuming alcohol a bad idea?

My conclusion: No. Children should not be able to do those things. Therefore, there are likely other things they should not be allowed to do.

I honestly can't believe we're even having this discussion.

I can't believe we're not having this discussion.

The driving example is a bit disingenuous because, in the US at least, driving isn't conceptualized as a "right" - it's formulated as a privilege. The drinking example is closer, but that's the right to self-determination. I don't suspect that you believe children have zero self-determination, nor do I suspect that you believe that one person's right to vote should be based on everyone in a particular class.

It would be unconscionable to say, "Women shouldn't be allowed to vote because some women can't make good decisions." I simply extend the same unconscionablity to children.

> "Women shouldn't be allowed to vote because some women can't make good decisions."

I of course disagree with that statement, but it would imply that some women _can_ make good decisions.

To carry that back to the original argument, you are implying there are children out there who are capable of participating in political discourse.

I disagree.

It's starting to feel a bit like I'm feeding the trolls here, so I'll let this be my final reply. Have a good day.

That’s not the argument. The argument is: restrict children from voting due to their lack of maturity in decision-making.

We apply this argument in all kinds of cases that are super-uncontroversial so it’s surprising to hear that it makes someone uncomfortable in this particular case.

If lack of maturity predicates voting, then we're inconsistently disenfranchising individuals within classes. That doesn't seem very fair and I don't really buy feasibility as an excuse. "Sorry, but it's not practically feasible to give you the rights you deserve," is beyond the moral pale.

We have laws about how our elders with Alzheimer's and dementia vote, but self-sufficient 17 year olds have no say in how their lives will be managed for the next 4 years. There's nuance you're glossing over.

Unless you’re going to allow babies to vote, we have to draw the line somewhere. It’s also not true that a 17 year old is disenfranchised for 4 years - they can engage with the political process as an adult as soon as they turn 18. Presidential elections aren’t the only feature of democracy. They aren’t even the only vote.

Right, and drawing arbitrary lines is guaranteed to step on toes. In some ways, the fairest way is to draw it at the extreme (I'm not suggesting this is best, just that it sidesteps this particular issue). Children are humans, they're affected by political pressures same as the rest (and they'll experience these pressure for longer than most of us). We're also already choosing not to restrict voting based on assumed capacity for reasoning. Individuals with down syndrome, dementia, and Alzheimer's have their voting rights explicitly protected, but 16 year-olds aren't ready.

I guess my point boils down to simply: Why? There's arguments both ways, what's the reasoning?

> Why? There's arguments both ways, what's the reasoning?

The reason is loki's fallacy is a fallacy for a reason.

For legal purposes we simply have to pick a line.

But regardless if the exact location of that line is arbitrary, it is still useful none the less.

There is no real issue with having an arbitrary line, if it is impractical to not have an arbitrary line, and useful none the less.

To give more obvious examples, we can take the drinking age, or the age of consent. Those line are arbitrary, but are still useful none the less.

For the record, I don't think that we're wrong to implement a minimum voting age, and I don't think toddlers should vote, but I still think it's a worthwhile thing to consider.

If (as I assume) our goal is to restrict voting to those deemed mature and of sound mind, then I'd expect to see similar laws enforcing such restrictions in other sectors of the populace. But we don't see that! Instead we see laws explicitly granting the right to vote to the elderly and mentally disabled. It's possible to end up in a situation where an individual is deemed mentally unfit to manage their own finances or medical decisions, but still able to influence the governance of an entire nation.

I'm personally quite fascinated by this. Maybe my assumptions are wrong! Wouldn't that be neat? My goal is not to suggest that our policy is bad or wrong, it's to suggest that the "allegedly unethical scenario of having a voting age" is actually quite complex and interesting!

Dumb example: Should Brittney Spears have the right to vote?

Interesting example: Should felons?

Whose voice does the 4 year old have? Theirs or their parents? What you do by opening the vote to children below a certain age is all you are doing is amplifying the vote of the parents, you are not giving voice to the children.

At what age does the child who can vote actually have the capacity to choose their candidate and are even able to negotiate the mechanics of voting? Let’s say 18 is too old, but how young before they are able to counter the influence of a parent and decide for themselves…I’d argue its at least well into their teens.

You'll be aghast as to what the average 44 year old believes then

You aren't going to gain life experience before the age if you keep raising the age of being allowed to live life to match that age.

I know you're specifically referring to voting age, but just making a general observation on how everyone seems to only want to keep increasing these various arbitrary age gates as if simply being older is all it takes. Have you guys all forgotten when you went through these points?

I still distinctly remember how glaringly stupid I realized the world was when I had to take a waiver notice to my university dorm room and sign as my dad a few days before turning 18, and that just a few days later I'd be fine to sign it as myself, despite obviously not changing much in a few days. Either way I had been living at a university thousands of miles from my parents for nearly 2 years and had said as much, so it was a farce all around.

Similarly with turning 21 and being allowed to drink.

Obviously the US needs more mature voters. To match the very mature leaders (“”) who are so mature that they have symptoms of senility or die on the job while their helpers vote for them.

Should we put age limit on voting? 70 doesn’t have the brain functionality of an 18 year old. Why they are very susceptible to fraud because of cognitive decline.

I think we should limit voting to those who block ads!

I support that idea because I think you should be in the work force and experience both taxation and laws personally before voting on them.

Believe it or not, our laws apply to children too! Other government programs that can affect children include schools, roads, libraries, healthcare, welfare... They're personally affected by a lot of political stuff.

While we're at it, why should adults be the ones deciding how the public school system works? It's been more than 10 years since I was in school, I doubt my experience is still relevant.

Personally, I think we should set the voting age to 35 and cut off everyone above 37. It’s too risky to let the old or young vote. We can raise both thresholds by one per year to account for inflation.

In that case most of Congress should recuse themselves from voting on abortion bills considering they've been shooting blanks and having hot flashes since the 90s.

That you were not fully informed when you voted at 18 is not a reason to restrict the rights of others who are. Or aren't. Who's to say a 25yo is somehow any better prepared to vote? It's not like they were asked to pass a civics test first.

Plenty of "idiots" outside the age range of 18-25, should we restrict them as well? How would we determine who is qualified to vote? Any other rights provided by the constitution you'd like to alter while we're at it? What other responsibilities available 18-25 year olds would you like to restrict? The draft, driving a vehicle, taking out loans, ...? Perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to choose their own clothing, what food they eat, ...

What's the drinking age in Florida?

> What's the drinking age in Florida?

The drinking age in all 50 states is 21 thanks in most part to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...

In Florida it was raised to 21 in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._history_of_alcohol_minimu...

In Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands it's still 18

> Because at 18 people are responsible for their own actions

This is only because we arbitrarily picked an age - we used to consider people responsible for their own actions at much younger ages, it makes sense to change the number when we get new science supporting that. If the argument is that we shouldn't use brain development as a reason to restrict young people, then why not lower the drinking age again or get rid of it?

This right here. Seems like the USA is all about arbitrary rules, isn't it?

You can join the military and drive a tank into war at 18, but god forbid we let you have a beer afterward.

Science has discovered that the age of 25 is when neuroplasticity starts to decline. So what? There's a lot of argumentation needed to link that physical threshold with legal restriction.

It seems like you're arguing that people shouldn't fully participate in society until they start losing their ability to learn. Have you met people who've lived overly sheltered lives until the age of 25? Their tolerance towards risk is low. Their ability to adapt to new experiences is busted. Forcing that on a society wide scale would be nuts.

The science does throw in a lot of complexity between the social ideas of freedom and the physical effects of alcohol. But have you met 18 year olds? They're drinking.

There's also the issue of life expectancy. In the US, for males? 77 years. Now we're basically saying "For the first third of your life, we're going to dictate a lot of what you can't do".

Policy should not be informed by TikTok memes about brain development.

Why let someone who isn’t responsible for their own actions drive a car then, or have a checking account.

> Why let someone who isn’t responsible for their own actions drive a car then, or have a checking account.

In many jurisdictions you cannot do those things without adult supervision.

You can drive without an adult at 16 everywhere in the US. No minimum age to own a long gun either I believe.

That’s because of Ralph Nader and the FDIC, obviously.

You are legally required to have auto insurance for exactly this reason. As for banking, there are limits on overdraft fees, also written into law because people are not always responsible with money regardless of age.

They try people as adults before they turn 18

Excellent, have a whole group of voters who aren't allowed access to certain political information. Or are you going to raise the voting age to 25 as well?

Perhaps we should also cut off people over 65, since they've proven to be more vulnerable to scams and financial exploitation over social media?

(there's real arguments to be had about the negative effects of social media, but a serious discussion would include those on adults and old people as well, and this ban, like the TikTok one, is definitely more a part of culture war than a well-intentioned effort to improve the effect of telecoms on people's lives)

It's not a TikTok ban.

Heck, why not ban it altogether?

In all seriousness, this is a great move that should be emulated. I'm a tech-optimist but the effect social media has on teenagers specifically and public discourse in general is absolutely toxic.

because the legal adult age in the US is 18?

Why not ban the businesses entirely? Certainly all the interesting points about banning TikTok apply even more to domestic companies than they do to foreign ones.

I'm a parent of an 11 and 14 year old and I have mixed feelings about this. First, I am concerned about the negative effect of social media on kids and my initial reaction to this was positive, but then I remembered my 11 year old daughter uses Messenger kids to keep up with her cousin across the country. They only see each other once a year so the fact that they have this connection I see as really positive, and the accounts on that platform are totally controlled by parents.

My son is old enough the law would give us a choice and I'd let him keep Discord I think as well. If there is something positive here though it would be forcing the companies to make it easier for parents to control what their kids do, it should just be up to them.

Why can't they do video calls and send emails? One on one is way better than posts seen in a timeline.

I guess you've never used Messenger or Discord. These are messaging applications that can do video calls. There is no timeline.

edit: actually, reading the text of the bill probably neither of those applications are in scope, because they do not have algorithmic feeds. They specifically state: "Employs algorithms that analyze user data or information on users to select content for users;"

https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/3/BillText/er/PDF

I grew up as social media came into being(mid 2000s). When I was 13, I got Myspace. When I was 16, I got Facebook. It wasn't until well into college that I realized the impact social media had on my mental health. I would go further and say nobody until 18 should have social media, but that may be unrealistic in 2024.

Just curious, how did it affect your mental health?

I would sit on facebook, refreshing and doom scrolling endlessly. When fb messenger came out I was monitoring facebook messenger when it first came out to see who was online. I was always a pretty lonely kid, and I thought social media would connect me with people. It didn't really.

This reminds me of sitting around on AOL Instant Messenger, summer afternoons pre-2000.

Facebook came out when I was in college, and I resisted for one semester; then if felt "inevitable" [that I join] since almost all classmates were on thefacebook.

----

At present, I do not carry a cell phone nor use email [it is heavenly, a rare gift]. When somebody is more than ten minutes late for a planned meetup, I depart.

Setting it to 18 is obviously pretty ridiculous. That's just going to continue the weird trend of infantilizing people by pushing back the age at which they learn to deal with things that require self control.

At 16 there are at least 2 years where parents have the ability to actually interfere and help bring any negative effects under control.

Do you know at what age people are able to properly deal with things that require self control? I believe that part of the brain doesn’t mature until early 20s. At 18 a person is legally an adult so 18 seems like a much more reasonable cutoff than 16.

People don't just start being able to deal with things that require self control at a specific age. It has to be taught. Even sex ed recognizes that, where it's far more effective to teach kids how to be safe during it rather than to teach them that they can do what they want after 18.

If you push off the learning to when the person can legally just do whatever they want, all you're doing is abdicating parental responsibility and setting the person up for addiction as an adult.

Yes people should be taught skills to deal with making good choices and learning self control. But we don’t give kids heroin as part of the lesson in learning self control. The biological imperative for sex is overwhelming and there’s not much we can do to stop it. There is a way to stop companies from enticing kids with social media addiction though.

We would give them heroin in a controlled manner if the consumption of heroin was the primary means of social interaction for the majority of adults. The heroin analogy is eye catching, but ultimately nothing more than idiotic "think of the children"-esque hyperbole.

We agree that giving kids access to heroin as a way to teach self control is idiotic. What we don't agree on is that social media in its current incarnation is heroin like. I think it is.

..heroin was the primary means of social interaction for the majority of adults..

We aren't talking about adults we are talking about kids. That the majority of adults use social media for social interaction is a separate problem and in no way indicates that we should subject kids to something as highly addicting and harmful as social media (in its current incarnation).

There are tons of studies that show that social media harmful to peoples' mental health. It is profoundly dumb for society to subject kids to it. In same way it is profoundly dumb to let drug companies advertise. People are easily manipulated and kids especially so.

You're forgetting that my argument is that by pushing the age of access to social media up to 18 (as the person I replied to proposed), we'd be pushing teaching social media 'literacy' to when parents lose the tools they have to teach their kids. If an 18 year old gets debilitatingly addicted to social media, the most they can do is threaten to kick them out, which I'm sure you can agree isn't really a solution, but if say, a 16 year old does that, the parents can take away their phone and forcibly disconnect them in various ways until they find a healthier balance.

While social media is addictive and unhealthy, it is the primary means of social interaction among adults, thus, just as we introduce high schoolers to adult things like driving, sex, job interviews, citing other's work etc through partial exposure to such things (eg junior driving permits, sex ed, mock interviews or relaxed punishments for academic dishonesty), we should be teaching kids how to have a healthy relationship with social media through limited exposure BEFORE they turn 18.

To this extent, I prefer one of the other suggestions in this post, that there should be two 'tiers' of social media, kids should still be allowed to access small platforms, and in particular, forums. Those are easier to monitor for parents and lack many of the ills of more 'modern' stream-of-consciousness style social media. As an additional point in favor of that approach, forums were pretty instrumental to my development of programming skills as an early teenager. Without the ability to participate on forums, my skills would've been considerably stunted.

… we'd be pushing teaching social media 'literacy' to when parents lose the tools they have to teach their kids.

There are ways of teaching said literacy without allowing unrestricted access to social media. Your last paragraph suggest one such way.

It’s not an all or nothing type situation. I think it’s clear the essence of what is being discussed with the Florida law is that kids shouldn’t be granted unrestricted access to social media and those companies should be required to enforce access rules to people under a certain age.

I believe we are in agreement on this.

Wait you can buy heroin in Florida if you’re over 16?

There are some things society thinks people should not be allowed to be legally tempted with. Some people think one of those things is social media for people under a certain age.

I was just pointing out the absurdity of your hyperbolic comparison to heroin.

It wasn’t absurd. It established that pretty much everyone agrees that government intervention is sometimes needed to protect people from their impulses. The idea that everyone (especially kids) can simply exercise self control when it comes things as addicting as social media is absurd.

> It established that pretty much everyone agrees that government intervention is sometimes needed to protect people from their impulses.

Wait, do... do people actually buy that reason for the War on Drugs?

Yes. There are some things so unhealthy that it is worthwhile to try to prevent people from using them. Heroin is one such substance in some peoples’ mind. Gambling is something that can be very addicting and destructive and as such society tries to keep kids from partaking in it. Similarly it is wise and worthwhile to keep kids off of social media.

When people say "the brain is still developing until you're 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at learning after the age of 25". Noting that, should people learn self-control in the presence of social media before 25, or after 25?

I believe the part of the brian that deals with impulse control isn’t fully developed until early 20s.

We don’t willingly and willfully let kids have access to alcohol and heroin. By your reasoning it seems like we should so that they can learn self control.

I mean a lot of Europe has fairly low age limits for purchasing alcohol, and even lower for drinking it in private.

I believe 16-year olds can still buy wine and beer at the grocery stores in Denmark. I’ve heard it’s fairly common for 14-year olds to drink at home in the UK - though the 14-to-16 range may be delaying on average since ~2010.

I don’t believe many countries allow adults access to heroin. I believe prohibition does more harm here due to lack of quality control and testing but reasonable minds could disagree.

Age of first exposure is a fairly open question across the globe. Everyone is experimenting with whats best and whats tolerable.

We agree then that limiting access to alcohol is appropriate at some age level. Different countries do it at different ages. What is optimal is society dependent.

I gather then that we are in agreement that limiting access to social media is appropriate at some age level. We perhaps disagree at what age that ought to occur.

Under that framework, we should learn self control as early as possible. We learn faster at age 6 than at age 16.

My Dad taught me how to play video games when I was around 6. By “taught”, I mean he just let me play, but enforced a rule that I’d have to stop playing if I couldn’t hold an attentive and emotionally appropriate conversation with him while I was playing Ninntendo.

This was hard for me! I had a natural instinct to tunnel vision into the game and not hear anything anyone was saying to me. I’d also get upset at the game and get angry in my conversations.

Training this into me at a young age really helped my emotional regulation and ability to socialize around / during games and not get too sucked into them. This was especially important because I was quite ADHD and that adds a lot of emotional disregulation.

> When people say "the brain is still developing until you're 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at learning after the age of 25".

No, it means that your prefrontal cortex—which is involved in a wide range of higher-order cognitive functions (planning, decision making, working memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior, risk processing)—is still developing, so until it does fully develop (colloquially at age 25, but it can vary per individual), you may lack those skills because you physically lack the plumbing for them to be present:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_cortex

* https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...

> They also found important clues to brain function. For instance, a 2016 study found that when faced with negative emotion, 18- to 21-year-olds had brain activity in the prefrontal cortices that looked more like that of younger teenagers than that of people over 21. Alexandra Cohen, the lead author of that study and now a neuroscientist at Emory University, said the scientific consensus is that brain development continues into people’s 20s.

* https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-development-25-ye...

Of course even post-"25" some folks still may lack them as well, but at that point there's no longer anything physically preventing you from doing so.

At 25 the brain is no longer plastic enough to learn self regulation. So if you wait till then to give people the chance to make mistakes you end up with a whole lot of women-children who can't function at all. The whole point is that you need to let people make mistakes so they can learn from them while they still can.

Saying that you have to wait to be an adult to make adult decisions is like saying that we shouldn't expose anyone under 3 to language since they can't speak.

I grew up with the birth of the internet and social media and I have the opposite feeling. I know that sound the old one monologue but I came from the time that social media were exclusively social and not a bunch of people creating content endlessly in the hope of making tons of money in the internet. I used aol, Microsoft Messenger, Facebook and a very famous Google social media on my country, called Orkut. None of these gave me anxious to see what's happening or any negative thoughts. In fact In using the internet and social medja learned so many things, meet different people outside of my country and from other states and learned about other cultures and other languages. All these years and I think the way that social media works is rotting people's brain: people barely pay attention on you because they are too busy seeing their timeline, people even use it on traffic and all of these people are adults that doesn't knew about social media until some years ago. Internet and Social media for children must be supervised and not restricted.

I understand where you’re coming from but these were not social media.

I used Orkut too. It was a place to talk to your real-life friends, join local communities and organize events. You didn’t develop a personal following or post selfies looking for approval.

Social media, as we have it today, allows individuals to broadcast their twisted mind to millions, and not via text - only cute pictures, memes, and 30-second clips. These are worlds apart.

Does this require everyone present a government ID to access anything online? Are international content provider going to be compelled to report transgressions to Florida state authorities?

This is a good question. Does this only apply if I write "i'm 14" when I sign up for the app? Or will I need to prove I'm not underage?

I think structuring the law as a penalty is "smart" in that the government does not have to explicitly ask providers to require ID, but I can't imagine them not being at significant financial risk without doing so. This will make the providers look like the "bad guy" to an end-user.

"I don't want my kids using social media without my permission" is a problem that already has a solution: put parental controls on your kids devices.

We don't need Daddy Government to make decisions that can and should be made by parents.

Restricting access to devices is the easy part (although keeping ahead of kids breaking in is not). Exposing your kids to enormous peer pressure and social isolation is the hard part.

There's a collective action problem here, though. Some parents are willing to do the hard thing and tell their kid no over and over and over. Most aren't. The result is that kids don't hang out in person any more and so the only social outlet left is digital, which makes the decision to ban it at the family level even harder because you may actually do more harm than good by forcing your child to not participate with his friends.

If there's widespread agreement that social media is dangerous and yet widespread difficulty coordinating a response among parents, isn't that exactly what the government is for?

Kids will quickly learn that if their parents say "yes", they can get on social media, and so parents will still have to say "no" over and over again. The only difference is now we need to make sure our government papers are in order before we participate in the most important communication forum of our time.

We can apply this to everything. No one is trying to raise the age of candy and soda purchase to 16. Although we know that having access to these things drastically impacts children's health. Fast food too.

Like it's the literal job of a parent to tell their kids no. Over and over and over again. So instead of parents teaching healthy habits easy with something a child will not be a le to avoid as an adult, we'll just unleash them on them right when failure is high impact because some parents are lazy and we're not willing to have public service campaigns anymore.

Or really want this is is one more step to a de-anon'd internet, where everyone's speech can be controlled.

Every parenting problem has the same collective action problem. It's called peer pressure.

The only effective response I'm aware of is a collective one. This is not that. This is fascism.

> This is not that. This is fascism.

fascism is when no kids on the internet

You don't have to do something all the way, for it to be that thing. A hop still qualifies as a jump. Demanding adults ID-verify their age is still fascism.

> put parental controls on your kids devices

We did that. My kids (twins) pooled their allowance money for a few months and had a friend at school buy them an old iPhone that they shared in a locker at school. They went wild on social media once they were set loose, to the detriment of everyone involved.

There was a government report in the last couple years that concluded (paraphrasing) “the ideal amount of social media for teens is greater than zero and less than ‘all day’—but it’s not clear where it becomes harmful.”

TL;DR-nature, uh, finds a way…

> They went wild on social media once they were set loose

Do you think keeping them away from it initially drove them to this faster?

I have wondered about that, but we didn’t keep them strictly from it. They had Instagram and a couple other things—with screen time limits and we knew their account handles. That was apparently enough friction for them to find a workaround. “Went wild” in this context means they signed up for dozens of accounts on dozens of different services—SnapChat, Discord, Instagram, and others I’d never heard of at all.

> we knew their account handles

I would've taken offence to this bit too, FWIW. Privacy is important.

> Privacy is important.

I strongly agree, but it needs to be balanced against being 14 on the open internet.

And you can't have it both ways here–it can't be "be a parent: control and limit your kids' on the internet" and "you have to give your kids complete privacy on the internet". My goal has always been to support their growth and development by giving them progressively more responsibility and autonomy as they grow up.

> And you can't have it both ways here–it can't be "be a parent: control and limit your kids' on the internet" and "you have to give your kids complete privacy on the internet".

Well I don't think I said otherwise, but not only is this rather absolute, it's not true. I don't see how limiting screen time, for example, precludes respecting their privacy.

May I ask: Why is it important to know their account handles?

Might as well put porn on TV and billboards and tell parents to cover their kids eyes and change the channel. It's about time government did something useful for once.

My daughter broke or worked around three different parental control systems, including Google's own Family Link. There is always some webview in some settings page that will not be regulated and can be used to browse the Internet or some crap like this. These systems are either all poor or this game of whack a mole is unwinnable in principle.

The recent World Happiness Report[0] concluded:

> In many but not all regions, the young are happier than the old. But in North America happiness has fallen so sharply for the young that they are now less happy than the old. By contrast, in the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the young are much happier than the old. In Western Europe as a whole happiness is similar at all ages, while elsewhere it tends to decline over the life cycle (with an occasional upturn for the old).

I think social media is a red herring. For whatever reason, young people in America are unhappy and instead if dealing with hard problems we think "let's just take social media away, that will fix it". Does Finland not have social media? Why are young people in Finland happier than they are in America?

I predict this trend will continue, we will take social media away from kids and they will still be unhappy as they look for things to do in their small apartment while mom and dad look at their cell phones.

[0]: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/happiness-and-age-summ...

I have a 14 year old and the content of social media seems to be what bums her out. She seems to be ingrained with the idea that she will never own a home, environmental disasters will be constant and the economy will be in shambles by the time she reaches adulthood.

Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media environment? I have not read any kind of large scale studies examining the "tone" of social media feeds in different countries but that would be interesting.

* Also whenever she says stuff like that I respond by letting her know she will be able to buy a house if she wants one, the economy will always be good for people who are work smart and hard, etc.

> she will be able to buy a house if she wants one, the economy will always be good for people who are work smart and hard, etc.

Yeah, I don't think that's true at all. Its just anecdata, but I have several friends in their 30s for which that's just not the case. They're smart and work (harder than I do, just not in tech), but the price of a down payment on a home is going up faster than they're able to save, and they already live relatively frugally. We live in a major metro area, not a particularly expensive one, but the same is true for most of my cousins in the same age range spread across the country.

I feel like my age group (mid 40s) is the last one that could afford home ownership, and me only because I got lucky by working in tech. Other people I know that are better educated and work harder than me are just shut out of the housing market, without some kind of windfall.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=conventional+97+mortgage&ia...

Is it easy to find one that doesn't require private mortgage insurance? I remember that being a sticking point when I looked into this in the past few years.

The problem I see with requiring such insurance is that I'd already be paying whatever interest rate on a higher loan amount for the same 15- or 30-year period and it's rather insulting when a high credit score isn't a signal that the loan is low risk. How many years of literally 0 late bill payments do I need before I can reasonably expect a bank to assume that I won't miss the payments that I sign up for? (Undefined, unless one has the 20% up front, then 0.) It's a bit of a joke.

Anyway, I guess that got a bit rant-y; just saying that this feels more like exploitation by banks than banks offering a reasonable option. It lowers one's purchasing power unless one is able to save for a down payment.

I didn't know I was supposed to be insulted by PMI, so I just paid it.

Why should the lender take on more risk because you don't like it?

You are totally right housing prices have skyrocketed relative to wages, but you cant just tell kids they are doomed. There have always been good times and hard times and there are always people who succeed or fail regardless.

> but you cant just tell kids they are doomed

But you can expose them to broader view points;

Why is owning a house a goal, or dilemma that would lead to depression? This is perhaps the "American" part; how many countries is home and automobile ownership a top coming of age marker?

Environmental disasters are going to happen (especially in top article of Florida) how can a kid take part through volunteering or voting for non disaster policies?

Economic disaster ^^ see above ^^ but yes, America has not grasped with demographic shift with baby boomer retirements; and a future lack of workers; this is where parents can teach children self sufficiency.

Owning a home is a goal because the alternative is lifetime wage slavery to fund a landlord’s lavish lifestyle.

People don’t want to be exploited and see home ownership as a way to get out of that cycle of exploitation and building enough wealth to someday retire.

Paying mortgage interest is even worse slavery in my limited experience. A mortgage really ties you down.

> building enough wealth

Our current environment looks like that if you are older. Thinking of your house as savings is weird: personally I think you need a house and retirement savings - and safe retirement savings is an oxymoron because it depends on the demographics and economy.

I'm not sure that younger people can rely on the idea that their house will be worth enough because it depends on population demographics - housing is a Ponzi scheme where the older population sells there home to younger people until at some point the youngest person risks being left with something worthless: Japan and Italy have houses for ¥0 or €1 due to aging population.

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/patrica-italy-town-one-euro-h...

The background problem of all this is what have been ingrained in our culture that money = success = happiness. Is not that they will or will not own a house, a car or a yatch, is the sense that they will never be able to be happy if they don’t get any of those. How many people follow careers that they are not interested in the least but they have “growth potential” or are a “path to success”. Now on top of that they see in social media people who “have everything” and are living the life and smiling 24/7 and they don’t understand that everything is just a show, books, radio, movies, tv, youtube it’s all the same, reality is on this side of the screen not in that.

I'm not sure if you intended it or not, but it reads like a justification of the Nobel Lie[1].

I don't think the truth can be contained once it's out. Truth, of course, wins out in the end.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie

> but you cant just tell kids they are doomed

Lying to them when they can see the evidence to the contrary is better?

I approach life thinking that I should do the best for myself and my family regardless of what broad societal problems are. I want to raise my kids to be the same way. There is no way I am going to raise them thinking they should just quit.

It isn't a lie, I don't know what the future will be but I know there will be people who thrive and people who wither.

I’m trying to imagine, as someone that was an adult for the 2008 crash, saying “the economy will always be good for people that work hard and smart” out loud with a straight face.

It would have to be either

a) a complete fabrication or

b) a little play on words where “working smart and hard” is the load-bearing bit of phrasing that implies that any negative impacts from economic downturn would strictly reflect on a person’s work ethic and/or intelligence.

“Don’t worry about the future, your net worth will reflect your personal worth regardless of external economic conditions!” sounds way more depressing than “the economic hardships you were born during and have seen in your short lifetime are not likely to evaporate by the time you enter the workforce”

Relevant to b) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy

> There is no way I am going to raise them thinking they should just quit.

I'm not sure it's a choice between telling them they're doomed and should quit, and misleading them (if not lying), is it?

They are not doomed.

I don't think so either. Perhaps I shouldn't have quoted this particular bit. All I meant was, ignoring the reality is worse than facing and dealing with it.

> There have always been good times and hard times and there are always people who succeed or fail regardless.

That is a weird statement. What does it mean when times are good or bad then?

If times are bad, and it feels like they are, then less people are going to succeed. I'm not sure pretending that problems don't exist improves your odds of being in the succeed category.

“I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.

But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.”

― Richard Feynman

I'll add my own anecdata here. My older kids are in their late 20s and one has bought a home and the other is buying a new build home this year.

My youngest is 18, the greatest consumer of social media of my 4 children, and she's convinced she won't be able to buy a home like her under-30 siblings are doing right now.

Sounds very much like a YMMV situation, but it feels like social media has influenced my youngest to believe otherwise.

If someone is convinced that all housing is going to stay/become extravagantly expensive, shouldn't they get into real estate development to cash in on the opportunity? So they can build houses/condos/etc. Seems like they could become architects, or real estate agents, or work for (or own) a construction company. Maybe designing robots that build houses. Or work for a REIT.

I notice a distinct lack of jobs like plumber or carpenter in that list. In some sense my parents are home builders (I'd say it's like a hobby for them), so I have some familiarity with the process. I even fill in some of the labor on occasion. It really doesn't require a lot of administrative work (though they avoid building in places with lots of codes at this point), but a ton of low-paid labor. I don't think any amount of money could ever get me to do concrete work, and pretty much every job sucks in South Texas in the summer, but roofing is the worst on that count. Plumbing and electrician probably pay a bit better at least, but it's still work that is often done by immigrants, so there is some competition.

I hesitated to use the word "construction" on purpose, because invariably someone on HN chimes in how back breaking manual labor is and how it wears out your body prematurely, etc.. :)

>I don't think any amount of money could ever get me to do concrete work

How complex is that work? Might it be a good candidate for machines/robots?

I'd think if it was amenable to mechanization, that would have happened in the last century or so. I distinctly remember Mike Rowe doing the job on his show "Dirty Jobs" so that might be worth looking up if you want a good picture of it.

There's plenty of machines involved to transport concrete via trucks and pumps and all that, but it always seems to end up with some grunt holding the nozzle and then lots of labor to ensure there are no voids and the surface is smooth.

I don't really know that much about robots, but the thing about houses is that nothing is really terribly exact - lots of stuff is just off by half an inch or something like that, so a lot of the work just ends up being somewhat custom. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing robots would handle well.

Maybe there's more room for it in prefab type construction? But of course there's a mobile home stigma there.

There’s a difference between being the owner of a construction business and being an employee. The business owner assumes the risks and upside if real estate is to become expensive, but the employees are mostly affected by supply and demand of other workers - I.e. even if there is high demand of workers in the real estate sector, if there’s a high supply of workers to satisfy the demand, there won’t be a big increase in salary for them.

That said, it does seem people generally are implicitly bullish on housing prices becoming more expensive over time. That’s how to interpret the fact that the first significant investment of many people's savings is a house.

If people held the contrary opinion (that real estate in general are going to deprecate in value) then the idea of buying a house may not be so ubiquitous .

I am an adult and I have the same concerns. Went to a top university, got a decent job, found a partner who also has a decent job and don't use social media much. Still don't think we would be able to own a home for a while, every time we get close to the financial ability to buy a house, the goal post moves. The economy has always been up and down. We've both seen harsh times economically when companies let people go on a whim. Healthcare is a nightmare. You could have a good job/health insurance most of your life and could be out of one for just a couple months, and if an incident happens in that period, you set yourself back by years in terms of savings. The environment keeps getting worse, considering we actually saw the things get worse in the last 30 years with our own eyes. There is just a perpetual fight to keep your quality of life consistent. Working hard and smart is no longer enough.

> Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media environment?

You might have something here. Given the other responses to your post which are largely unrelated but undeniably depressing. Now I have to go see if such a study exists...

I don't know if I'm that smart, but I worked as hard as I could at my last tech job and still got laid off. Do own a house, but it was basically a gift from the parents - maybe you can buy your daughter one too?

> She seems to be ingrained with the idea that she will never own a home, environmental disasters will be constant and the economy will be in shambles by the time she reaches adulthood.

This is very troubling. Without social media teens would have to hear those things from their elders and peers in person or read about them elsewhere on the internet

These are all nonsense though

This is a good point. Because you disagree with that, it is not ubiquitous

> Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media environment?

Perhaps America is a bigger target than other countries for foreign influence operations that seek to cause division and depression using social media.

Perhaps America was a uniquely divided society from the very beginning? Either that, or foreign influence operations have been a multigenerational affairs - which year or decade could one say America was not divided?

To double down: chattel slavery, the expansion west by conquest, a civil war, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow and Japanese internment camps are not the ingredients of a cohesive society. The fault lines in American society were not imposed from the outside. There was never a point when the US was egalitarian in practice.

This and this again. Tiktok is a foreign influence machine on its own and it is wrecking havoc across the West. Compare Western Tiktok to Chinese Tiktok and see the difference for yourself.

Let's take TikTok down. I am all for it.

Let's also take Facebook and Instagram down, though.

Bad propaganda from China that makes our kids depressed is as bad as the same bad propaganda from an American company. And Facebook stopped being a place to make friends a long time ago.

I think my 25 year old son had bought into the same thought pattern. I’m trying to help, but parents are often thought to be clueless.

Having said that, I’ve found FOMO hitting me hard when looking at Facebook posts, so I’ve stopped looking, and feeling better.

Not sure we should be trying to fix away awareness of the climate crisis, which seems to be a blind spot for most older people preventing the democratic process from taking the needed drastic actions.

(Same could be said for the increasing economic inequality despite record GDP, though it's more survivable near term)

I think these two things are in conflict. Drastic action on the climate will almost certainly make most people's lives harder (at least in the short term) and will probably be tougher on the poor than the rich - for examples food price increases due to higher energy costs. Once you get down to the nuts and bolts of the changes needed, it's a tough sell to those already struggling.

If you include all the externalities, fossils fuels are the most expensive, not the least expensive, of the alternatives we have today.

> Drastic action on the climate will almost certainly make most people's lives harder

The human body cools itself by evaporation of sweat. This mechanism stops working at 95 degrees F at 100% humidity, or at 115 degrees with 50% humidity. Last summer in southern Indiana, where I live, we have a week of over 100 degrees/50% humidity.

Recall, if you have a temperature of 103 degrees, they recommend you see a doctor immediately. Over 108 degrees and you risk brain damage.

And currently the world is warming at the rate of just over 1/3 of a degree per decade. Drastic action? The most drastic thing we could be doing is nothing.

Solar is already cheaper than coal, and the price of solar panels is following a Moore's law like curve. Wind farms aren't far behind, and they've already saved Texas's bacon a couple of times.

It doesn't matter how many social media sites they shut down, kids are going to be depressed because nobody seems to take the problems their generation are going to face seriously.

You might also say that past increases in economic inequality have come from other factors, so you might say we have headroom to roll back those to compensate for the climate crisis caused effects.

(Also as the poor are even now hit hardst by global heating, there's definitely a moral responsibility for the rich to do much more)

There's a big difference between awareness and filling young people with so much doom that they lose hope about their lives. Far too many young people have sacrificed their mental health at the altar of the climate crisis and it doesn't help make anything better if you just end up depressed and hopeless.

"Never own a home."

As I say at every opportunity: it's housing prices.

Housing prices are the #1 reason for youth "doom and gloom" about their economic future, at least in many Western countries and especially anglosphere countries.

Social media doesn't help, especially for teens (and it's apparently worse for girls), but it's not the only or even main cause.

"I respond by letting her know she will be able to buy a house if she wants one..."

Guess you haven't mentioned that Santa isn't real, either.

> by letting her know she will be able to buy a house if she wants one

It should be easy to prove, right? Run the numbers for median income at specific age, house costs, interest, inflation, etc. for your area. If it's obviously affordable, you can show it. Depending on the location, you may not like the answer though... That fear is not completely made up, you know?

I guess most of us are waiting for that inevitable bubble pop, but... you know the saying about irrational markets.

> environmental disasters will be constant

The way things are going and with our response... yeah, I worry the same. At this point just the inertia of the system will make things worse for close to a decade, even if we get much better. It's a valid worry.

If you're saying to her you're basically ignoring those possibilities, that's unlikely to help with being worried.

> I respond by letting her know she will be able to buy a house if she wants one

I assume she's good at math? I'm sure she's solved way harder math problems than calculating how long it will take to save up a $200k down payment when you make $4k a month and pay 80% of that in rent and taxes.

> the economy will always be good for people who are work smart and hard,

Ummm....well, if that's been your experience, God bless you man. But you are writing a check you can't cash if you say it will be true of your daughter's generation.

Is it really even a good idea to emphasize hard work? My teachers/parents always said if I worked hard enough I would succeed, but man, this has only made me work 50, then 60, then 80 hours a week, desperately trying to turn an inherently doomed project into a success.

I've worked waaaay harder on my failures than on my success. That one time I was competing with a team of 5 russian Ph.D.'s to see whose software library would go into the product. That one time at a startup, where I found out too late that the founder always fires all his workers before their stock options vest.

Even my failed marriage!! I worked harder trying to keep things together than I ever worked on anything. With my current wife its not work at all. If you just tell your daughter that hard work will always ensure success, you are just setting her up for serial burnout after burnout.

If you are working hard, that's not a sign you are winning, its a sign you are losing.

And blaming it on social media is just shooting the messenger.

You are really ignoring that I put smart before hard.

Sorry things haven't gone your way though, I am kinda surprised someone could have been in tech for > 10 years and not have significant savings, stock, real estate or something built up.

> You are really ignoring that I put smart before hard.

chuckle. Well, I'm sure that will cheer up the kiddies: "I guess you just don't deserve a house, because you aren't smart enough."

> I am kinda surprised someone could have been in tech for > 10 years and not have significant savings,

That'll cheer up the kiddies too :-) "Wow, what's wrong with you; I can't believe you don't have anything to show for your 4 years in college and 20 years working for the man....how is that even possible? I guess you just didn't have what it takes..."

After such words of encouragement, I'm feeling better already :-) chuckle I don't want to pillory you, but I hope you might consider the possibility that canceling Tik-Tok isn't going to be some magic bullet to cheer up the youth.

I've had my fair share of success and failure--its just that the successes were sooooo much easier than the failures. If the team is right, the product-market fit is right, and its an idea whose time has come, the whole universe seems to be pulling for you. Yes, you are humping, but it's because you are like a kid on an easter egg hunt, and want to pick up as many easter eggs as you can!

But what if there're no easter eggs in the field? I.e. if the economy is down, they laid off all the people who actually know how the code works, the ones who are left introduce 5 bugs for every 1 bug they fix..

...it's like trying to paddle a boat upstream vs downstream. Yes, some factors are in your control, and you should make sure those are taken care of.

But by far the lion's share of success comes from things entirely out of your control:

* What country were you born in?

* Did you have teachers who cared?

* Could your parents pay for college, or did you start off $100k in debt?

* Did you avoid coming down with multiple sclerosis, or having a drunk driver plow into you, etc so you never had any long-term health problems?

* Did the president of the united state just spend $3 trillion of your dollars on an oil war which gave us absolutely nothing in return?

* Did those jerks on wall street detonate the economy again?

* Did the president cut taxes for everybody else but you, and finance it literally by printing money, bloating the money supply, and inevitably resulting in increasing the debt by $8.5 trillion and sparking the worst inflation we've seen since the OPEC crisis?

* And is he just going to get away with trying to steal your vote, so what little say you still have have will also be taken away?

The kids have a legitimate beef. You are not going to "work smarter, and harder" your way out of this.

I couldn’t agree more.

The idea that “working hard and smart leads to success” is “toxic” in so. Any ways one of which you’ve explained. The other is how it leads successful people to (often falsely) believe that their success is mainly attributable to their hard work and intellect, and assume moral superiority over other less successful people.

Somehow it eludes people that while “hard” work and “being smart” is generally a virtue, there’s often situations in life where one can’t consciously control the outcome.

Instead of (implicitly?) measuring the virtue (or even “worth”) of people by how successful they are, perhaps society as a whole should start recognizing that most people probably already gave their best regardless of eventual outcome, and while some might be more “lucky” than others by some metrics, in the end we are all human beings and everyone deserves the same level of respect.

Lying to her like that will probably undermine her trust in you going forward. I understand that you mean well, and sometimes we have to lie to kids about things that are too complex for them to understand, but this doesn't sound like one of these cases. It might be more effective to gently massage the truth so that it's compatible with the negativity she's digested, i.e. 'here's what's being done to manage the climate, here's the measures that are keeping the economy in good shape'.

Interesting young populations bordering all too real conflicts and war and existentially threatening neighbors are happier than people who have, by comparison, so much less to be unhappy about.

Also the old are very rich in America. They hold stocks and do well. I’m a millennial and can’t say I’ve had that experience. I would bet old Europeans own less securities and are less wealthy possibly. This decreases the older generations happiness possibly and may artificially raise youth happiness in comparison.

It’s all interesting and there’s a lot here to look at and ponder over. I do think there’s something unique about American youths and how they use these technologies though.

I would also bet there’s less commerce masked as social media platforms Europe. Many young Americans sort of blend the use of these apps with attempts to make money. That’s my perception at least. That may introduce stressors not seen in a society which doesn’t have such a focus on being industrious or busy constantly.

> Also the old are very rich in America. They hold stocks and do well.

That is quite a generalization. The rich old people are indeed very rich.

Also, a lot of old people are quite poor and poverty is increasing in that age bracket.

https://www.ncoa.org/article/latest-census-bureau-data-shows...

We spend far, far more on a single invalid dementia patient in a nursing home than on a poor family with young kids.

And not nearly enough on preventing young single people from becoming poor single mothers.

Came here to write similar things. The US has had absolutely unrivaled prosperity in the last 70 years. I think some healthy global arbitration is occurring. Globalization, remote work, and raising standards of living mean there are fewer faceless foreign workers to grind to dust—some of that pain inevitably will come back home now in the form of lower real wages and less glamorous work.

Young people still have good wages and opportunities, but it is hard not to be envious of previous (white) generations that could expect a separated house and a pension for working at a factory. It would be nice if young people could have a broader perspective on this point, but that’s a complaint as old as civilization.

Social media certainly doesn't help, but once again, the powers that be find everything to blame except for themselves for creating the conditions of misery necessary for "infinite" growth

Pretty wild to watch the basic rights of people in red states backslide in real time. Now there is the (what should be unnecessary) legal question of whether you can even run a social media platform with anonymous users in the state of Florida. Needing de facto governmental verification to communicate with people on the internet is something I had hoped I would never live to see in America. Hopefully it will not be fully enforced to the letter of the law.

There isn't really such a question. The law explicitly requires anonymous third-party age verification to be offered as an option. There are definitely concerns about how well that will work in practice, and I would definitely want to wait and see how it works in Florida before advocating for a wider rollout, but this Florida bill is actually the most reasonable of these age verification requirements rolled out to date.

I'm all for a healthy skepticism of government intervention, but my feeling is let's let Florida try this out and see what happens.

If you think kids won’t route around this then you don’t know kids. Its a political move for desantis to rally his base, nothing more.

Like I said, let's wait and see. I don't expect all kids to keep off social media—not all kids stay away from alcohol either—what I'd hope is that a significant enough percentage of them stay off that kids who do stay off have an easier time setting up healthier interaction patterns among their friend groups.

The more insidious undertone is that Florida is (or is establishing legal precedence for) policing information access.

If anything is detrimental to the health of a child, it's a restricted worldview.

You say there is no question, but it is already being raised by social media companies as an issue with the law. Anonymous age _verification_ is not something that exists. This requires government documentation, which means any solution that involves storing identity verification information would de facto allow the government to unmask users. This raises serious free speech concerns for everyone that uses these websites in Florida.

1) 3rd party service (Verifier) receives government documentation proving that the owner of {{account ID}} is over the age of 21.

2) Verifier records the fact that the owner of {{account ID}} has proven they are of the age of majority. They throw away all other identifying information, including their exact age.

3) The individual logs in to Verifier from Social Media. Verifier certifies to Social Media that the individual is over the age of majority.

There's no technical barrier preventing this outcome, and if you read the text of the law this is very clearly what the legislature envisions. Will it work? I don't know. Let's wait and see.

Let's just ignore the fact this doesn't exist for the sake of going through the mental exercise. Whether identity services are allowed to discard the logs is a legal question. The time in which a user makes a verification request for a website is de-anonymizing in of itself. The government could access both services either in real-time (remember this has already happened here) or depending on how things are stored at a later date to link identities to accounts. So the government has ways get all the information it needs to de-anonymize people who use social media in Florida if enforced.

You skipped over the Verifier expecting to be paid in some manner, being very likely to be paid using credit card, and thus having to retain those logs. Thus still making it easy to unmask users.

Social Media company would probably be the one to pay Verifier.

A fairly basic version of anonymous verification would be that local stores sell an age token. You show them your ID, like you would for buying alcohol, and they give you the token which could then be used with online services to prove you're over a certain age.

It only becomes a problem if stores are forced to store the ID and link it to the token in some way.

Teenagers are gonna be stoked when they can pick up their internet access chip AND alcohol in one stop

"Anonymous third-party age verification" is an oxymoron. You can't verify age anonymously.

Hey Reuters, no thanks for not linking to the Florida bill in question. The bill is CS/CS/HB 3 - Online Protections for Minors [1][2].

[1] https://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Bills/billsdetail.as...

[2] https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/00003/

I think this adds an incredible amount of risk to almost any US-based social media site, big or small, regardless of which state you're in.

You can't 100.0% block all Floridians from accessing your site, especially with GeoIP databases. This means someone who is close enough to the border of Alabama or Georgia with an IP address reportedly in another state could easily find reason to sue you.

And because you're in the US, you can easily be made to show up in a costly court battle over state lines.

This is horrifying news for small/medium sized social media sites.

The bill seems to be targeting certain types of social media platforms. I'm not sure everyone is at risk. What small/medium sites do you have in mind? HN doesn't seem to be a target for example.

I'm not a lawyer so I'll happily accept a more thorough analysis.

My quick reading of the bill leads me to think that smaller forums might actually qualify -- unless I missed a section on size of social network.

This bill says:

(I apologize for the incredibly bad formatting below, I've edited a few times to try to get things right)

> A social media site must fufill the criteria:

> ...

> 2. Ten percent or more of the daily active users who are younger than 16 years of age spend on average 2 hours per day or longer on the online forum, website, or application on the days when using the online forum, website, or application during the previous 12 months or, if the online forum, website, or application did not exist during the previous 12 months, during the previous month;

...when I was in high school, I spent a filthy amount of time on online tech forums. If Hackernews were around back then, I would've likely been on it for 2+ hours just reading random links.

> 3. Employs algorithms that analyze user data or information on users to select content for users; and

> 4. Has any of the following addictive features:

> a. Infinite scrolling, which means either:

> (I) Continuously loading content, or content that loads as the user scrolls down the page without the need to open a separate page; or

> (II) Seamless content, or the use of pages with no visible or apparent end or page breaks.

> b. Push notifications or alerts sent by the online forum, website, or application to inform a user about specific activities or events related to the user's account

> c. Displays personal interactive metrics that indicate the number of times other users have clicked a button to indicate their reaction to content or have shared or reposted the content.

So... any algorithm that selects "hot/active" content based on views+interaction, upvotes or emails about people who reply to your comments.

Now combine this with:

> When taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

So what defines "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors"? This seems like something that might be applied on very arbitrary grounds and won't require much to trigger it.

https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/3/BillText/er/PDF

Neither HN, nor forums would qualify for this. Reddit would.

Afaik, HN does not tailor the front page per user (log out then log back in. The FP is the same)

It doesn’t seem to specify if it needs to be tailored to a specific user or not, hence my concern about Hot/Active sorts.

Though, say this is for targeting specific users, I wonder if a workaround would be to batch users into groups and cater information to generalized groups…

worth remembering what this sort of stupidity actually means: creating the infrastructure for US government(s) mandated and approved identity verification on the Internet. this has a number of serious consequences, unrelated to children learning awesome dance moves:

- it's obviously a massive violation of whatever remains of "free speech" in the US, and allowing this to happen creates a precedent for nibbling at all sorts of other things - creates precedent that children are even more subservient to their parents and random whims of whatever politicians are in charge at any point

- it creates the technical infrastructure and precedent for random US governments and whatever lunatics control them at the time to mediate permission to access websites

- it creates a massive database of PII, this time focussed on kids, which will be accessed endlessly by random companies, and will de facto have no actual access controls

- it spews government-required and validated PII around loads of random websites - hacking a site and then quietly passively copying all their calls to the database will be of great interest to fuckwits around the world

- will require trying harder to geo-locate users, creating even more PII and having even more of it being government-audited

- creates a huge hammer for politicians to beat up on unfavoured companies / blackmail them

- undermines the functioning of the US as a coherent unified state

Could we maybe also start passing laws under which internet connected devices such as phones are not allowed in schools during class? I fear that we’re raising a generation of scatter brained know nothings with attention spans of a fruit fly, who watched YouTube in class instead of listening to the teacher. That is not without cost - some of those kids will have much worse life outcomes due to the lack of even basic education.

Your fear is not unfounded in the slightest. Going to repost a comment I made on the same article elsewhere:

There is an enormous wealth of research showing social media access at a young age is INCREDIBLY detrimental.

* [The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right](https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/03/smartph...) - Hanna Rosin, The Atlantic, March 2024

* [End the Phone-Based Childhood Now](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-...) (Unpaywalled at [MSN](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/end-the-phone-base...)) - Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, March 2024

* [Get Phones Out of Schools Now](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/ban-smartp...) - Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, June 2023

* [The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-...) - Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, November 2021

* [The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012](https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness-epidemi...) - Jonathan Haidt, Afterbabel, February 2023

* [Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health](https://www.afterbabel.com/p/sapien-smartphone-report) - Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch, Afterbabel, May 2023

* [Coddling Plus Devices? Unequivocal Disaster for Our Kids.](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/books/review/jonathan-hai...) - Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, New York Times, March 2024

The biggest thing about social media is that it NEVER stops. Growing up, if you had trouble with bullying at school, it ended when you went home, your home was your safe zone. Now there are no safe zones.

not only that, but i fully believe that kids are WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY to impressionable and influenceable. there is a reason kids can't do a lot of things until 18 (even through the brain doesn't fully develop till 25). kids should not be influenced by social media to be doing permanent things that could harm themselves (like gender transitioning, getting a tatoo or piercing, or doing something dangerous challege) or their future careers (like breaking the law so they have a criminal record).

honestly social media is a wonderful thing, but something has to be done. i personally believe that parents need to have more power in discipling their children. i don't like the fact that laws like this have to be created, but i see that they have to exists with the more power they take away from the parents.

> if you had trouble with bullying at school, it ended when you went home, your home was your safe zone.

I went to school just at the cusp of digital bullying. A yahoo group was set up specifically to bully one kid in my class. It was shut down by yahoo, but I think because it was hosting porn, not because it was mostly designed for bullying people.

This was in the days of shared computers, and no real notifications. Now the bully is in your pocket.

I don't know what the equitable answer is. out right banning is wrong. But we do need to significantly more to allow people to escape bullying.

It was already de-facto illegal for people under 13 to have social accounts. Do you know any kids younger than that on social media? I do.

This is the equivalent of paper bags for beer cans - it will do nothing to fix the problem, but it will make children slightly more secretive about their internet usage, which will make some situations (grooming, bullying) even worse.

> Do you know any kids younger than that on social media? I do.

That isn't really how laws work. You don't say: "Driving under the influence is illegal, but I totally know people who drink and drive so the law is useless".

A solution doesn't need to be 100% effective for it to be hugely beneficial to society.

The point is that the pre-existing law was already completely ineffective. This one will be no better.

One can restrict consuming a resource only if one has means to police such restrictions. Unless you agree to draconian measures, like having all browsers under police control at all times, there is no real way to police web access by age.

So, we shouldn’t make laws even if we think they are good because we aren’t exactly sure exactly how we will enforce them?

The legislative and executive functions are separate in our system. The former passes laws and the latter figures out how to enforce them.

I was curious how the bill defines "social media" since it is a vague term. Here's the bill: https://m.flsenate.gov/session/bill/2024/3/billtext/er/pdf

The definition starts near the bottom of page 3.

Seems to me like this criteria would be hard to prove and easy for platforms to game:

> Ten percent or more of the daily active users who are younger than 16 years of age spend on average 2 hours per day or longer on the online forum, website, or application on the days when using the online forum, website, or application during the previous 12 months or, if the online forum, website, or application did not exist during the previous 12 months, during the previous month;

Anyone know why that criteria even exists in the first place?

Pains me as it does to admit it, I'm OK with this, and I'm so glad that I grew up in an age before TikTok existed.

Social media in its current form is designed to be as addictive as possible as a method of revenue generation. That's it. The more time we spend on these apps, the more money they make. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are designed from the ground-up to take as much time and attention as possible by using the same tricks that slot machines use. This is well-known and well-documented amongst _people like us_ who work in tech. It's less well-known outside our bubble.

Plenty of adults are unable to break the curse of the endless scroll, so what chance do children have?

It is, in my opinion, as dangerous as cigarettes, and we don't allow 11-year-olds to buy those. I don't know if a ban is the way to go, but something's gotta change.

In light of empirical evidence, it is positive legislation. However, let us not be fooled that the problem is the algorithms. In my anecdote I see a clear divide between the classic phase of interaction in chronological order and algorithmic intervention.

The action of algorithms orchestrating human interactions reminds me of Asimov's Mule[0] and at this point in events it is certain that the algorithm builders have very fine control over human mental patterns. If I were to choose just one target for my efforts to sanitize the internet I would focus my fire on algorithms. Legislate without mercy.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_and_Empire

> at this point in events it is certain that the algorithm builders have very fine control over human mental patterns

IMO this dramatically oversells the power of recommender systems, and in a way which further serves their owners' interests rather than challenging them. In fact, I think what's clear is that they are at best able to achieve a very gross level of control over human mental patterns, one which is not meaningfully different than previous forms of media that have popped up throughout history. "Engagement", keeping someone scrolling long enough that they accumulate a nontrivial probability of clicking on an ad, is the lowest common denominator of marketing. Television, radio, and print media have long understood how to keep people serially "engaged" (consider the 'if it bleeds it leads' mentality of local news, or the emergence of 'angertainment' on CNN or FOX in the 90s and onwards).

But stimulating engagement is very different from actually controlling someone or altering their behavior in a way beyond "hey look at this interesting thing!". Consider that the click-through rate for Meta ads is on the order of ~1%, and this is literally their most valuable metric. They achieve this not by actually persuading people that an ad they don't care about is actually interesting (which to me would be the real acid test of whether they have 'fine control'), but rather by (a) effectively segmenting the audience in a way TV can't and (b) keeping the audience engaged long enough that maybe they click an ad. While they're no doubt good at both of these things, I think it's telling that the best these platforms have been able to do is the same strategy that every other form of mass media has also stumbled on: throw enough sensational crap your way that you stick around long enough to maybe click an ad.

To your point more directly: I agree that being able to agitate large groups of people in the same way is a dangerous ability, but I think it's also one that's very old and very common. It is not the unique provenance of 'algorithms', it's just the nature of mass media acting as a demagogue (look at role of newspapers in the lead-up to the Spanish-American war, for an example that predates our modern era). The way we challenge this is IMO not by treating the problem as something entirely new and overwhelmingly powerful ("big tech algorithms are mind control rays"), it's by looking at the historical record and recycling the strategies which have worked before (libel and slander laws, journalistic ethics, and trust-busting). Certainly there are elements of the problem which are new and unique , but from where I'm sitting the differences seem smaller than the similarities.

Great. I think few people have any doubts about social media being a net negative for young people.

Young people? I’d say people in general.

Perhaps that is part of the problem with these laws: we are playing a game of whack-a-mole instead of tackling the issue of mental health. While I personally avoid social media due to privacy concerns, I have encountered other adults my age who have expressed that they avoid social media for reasons related to mental health. While walking through my neighbourhood, it is clear that there are many people with mental health issues that society has all but abandoned. Then there are the people who have issues that they do not talk about and cannot be seen.

You are literally posting to social media right now.

Perhaps it is because I put a heavier emphasis on the word media, but I don't really classify HN as a social media site. It's more of a forum where people discuss submitted articles. The dynamics are entirely different.

For one thing, there is a lot less "attention seeking" behaviour. While YCombinator and associated companies use it as a promotional tool, it is muted. Some end users may use it to drive traffic to their blogs or show off their skills, but it usually comes off as humble and related to common interests (or maybe the blatant self-promoters rarely make it to the front page). Even though some of the people who frequent (or pop in) here are more recognizable, I doubt that anyone is trying to win a popularity contest.

I think stuff like that is important when considering the psychological impact of a site. For good or for ill, reality is reality. In contrast, social media sites tend to be driven by fantasy: fame and fortune for creators, endless exponential growth for investors, and all of that nonsense. That distortion of reality can be damaging for those who either seek to achieve it and for those who feel they will never measure up.

I don't find the broad stroke of "mental health" very useful in any discussions since it implies there is a baseline mentally healthy state. I think some people are able to handle social media and others aren't, and that's completely fine.

While I agree that mental health is an awfully broad stroke, I have seen few discussions that represent it as a baseline for a mentally healthy state. It is typically used when either self-harm or harm to others is involved.

> tackling the issue of mental health

What if reducing social media usage was a good way of tackling mental health issues?

That is for the individual to decide, just like any other malady.

The mental health issue was pre-empted by the advertisement-based business model that threw everything into an algorithmic blender to begin with, causing users to scroll more and more.

I suspect literally billions of people have some doubts about that.

Do they happen to fall in a certain age group?

> I think few people have any doubts about social media being a net negative for young people.

They should have doubts. This position is not supported by the currently available evidence[0][1][2]. The APA’s position paper makes this explicit: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”

So long as focus remains on scapegoating ‘social media’ as the main cause of suffering, we will never solve the problem. The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally, and as far as I can tell are largely manifestations of deeper societal issues that have festered for generations.

[0] https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8221420/

[2] https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...

> The APA’s position paper makes this explicit: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”

I think this is just saying that social media is still part of society, and so there is nothing inherently bad in using social media, which is just an extension of our offline lives. That doesn't mean it's not harmful - if the offline life is harmful, social media can amplify it.

> The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally

The APA paper is filled with warnings specifically about adolescent social media use:

> ...potential risks are likely to be greater in early adolescence — a period of greater biological, social, and psychological transitions...

> Parental monitoring... and developmentally appropriate limit-setting... is critical, especially in early adolescence.

> Evidence suggests that exposure to maladaptive behavior may promote similar behavior among vulnerable youth, and online social reinforcement of these behaviors may be related to increased risk for serious psychological symptoms, even after controlling for offline influences.

> Research demonstrates that adolescents’ exposure to online discrimination and hate predicts increases in anxiety and depressive symptoms, even after controlling for how much adolescents are exposed to similar experiences offline.

> Data indicate that technology use particularly within one hour of bedtime, and social media use in particular, is associated with sleep disruptions. Insufficient sleep is associated with disruptions to neurological development in adolescent brains, teens’ emotional functioning, and risk for suicide.

> Research suggests that using social media for social comparisons related to physical appearance... [is] related to poorer body image, disordered eating, and depressive symptoms, particularly among girls.

There’s an alternative to a blanket restriction on all types of social media:

When I was growing up, there was basically just ICQ (predominantly chat, sparse text profile), then MSN (predominantly chat, sparse text profile with one or a few profile photos), then early MySpace where nobody was uploading their real identity. I think it would have been a shame to not have access to those types of networks. I met so many people through those types of networks.

The law could put a restriction only on the post-2005 type of social media which is about publishing a curated stream of life updates with one’s real identity in rich media (photos, videos). If you take that all of that out, there’s nothing to ‘like’ or compare yourself to.

According to the article, the bill requires social media platforms ban accounts belonging to underage users and delete “personal information collected from terminated accounts”.

I’m no lawyer and haven’t read the actual text, but if you have a platform where there are no accounts and everyone posts anonymously or under a pseudonym, like 4chan, it completely sidesteps this.

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39822577

On one hand: social media preys on people of all ages to collect precious data points, know your habits, sell your profile to advertisers which then is used to deliver “targeted ads”. The algorithm then picks up on your habits, and recommends shit you would interact with. The more you interact with “x” content, the more the algorithm tests you with related content or worse (ie, anti abortion ads, aLpHa MaLe content, “own the libz”, “let’s Go BrAnDoN”). Echo chambers formed. The country becomes further divided. Adversaries of the US inch closer to disrupting a “super power” as the country implodes from within (it nearly happened on January 6th, 2021).

Social media is like a drug. And should be treated as such. I would kind of support this legislation.

BUT, at the same time. Why is the state government mandating this? Where are the parents? Maybe they are also dazed by the drug of social media. ItS jUsT aN aPp, mentality. Yet what they don’t realize is these companies spend billions of dollars to fine tune the algorithm to build profiles on all of their users. Focus grouped to help. Decades of psychology used against the mind of a pre-teen, elderly, or the uneducated. They stand no chance.

I’m also concerned at where this stops. First its to protect the children. Then it progresses to full blown censorship of the internet (ie, “Great (fire) Wall of china”). The so called “small government party” is pushing this as well, which is concerning.

> The so called “small government party” is pushing this as well, which is concerning.

Is there any such thing as a small government party, or only parties that want any parts of government they disagree with to be non-existent*?

An examination of the past several years in Florida may shed light on this.

* And often more of the parts they like.

Does anyone know where to find the actual law text? Otherwise it's hard to assess, what this really means.

https://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Documents/loaddoc.as...

isn't this misguided? good regulation would go after why sites are designed to be addictive / target children - targeted ads.

Can anyone not from the US explain how we can work with the data from social media? These are the questions we need to address:

1. How can we identify if the user is based in Florida? 2. How can we determine their age? 3. How can we map the parent-child relationship here? 4. What will happen if the account was created in Argentina during traveling?

It’s a start! Hope this gets studied before it gets shut down.

I feel that more than anything this is a subsidy for all of Desantis's lawyer friends - paid for by residents of Florida. While Florida was an odd state when I moved here 40 years ago, it has become more surreal at an accelerating pace. I wonder if the simulation has a local glitch.

I hope for them a "social media" is well defined, because it gets blurrier as years pass.

> Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, opposed the legislation, saying it would limit parental discretion and raise data privacy concerns because of the personal information users would have to provide to be age-verified.

They can delegate or they can archive and choose not to use this data for anything other than the stated purpose.

Are they indirectly saying that they can't restrain themselves and that any data they collect for whatever reasons is fair game ?

I guess their problem is if someone submits identifying data willingly they will not be able to use it for other purposes without consent and they will look suspicious even when they infer the data/connections independently.

I do love the US Right's hilariously dishonest obsession with "free speech" and how the rest of the US engages with them as if it is some good faith disagreement.

the Right should also be more worried - requiring the construction of this sort of Technological Autocracy Infrastructure should scare them, since presumably they won't always be in charge. of course the flip side is that a lot of the leaders are Christian Dominionists who aren't worried about that, since they want to end the United States as it currently exists.

anyway, cheery! hope everyone agrees that not letting kids see what Rhianna had for lunch or whatever was worth it.

> hope everyone agrees that not letting kids see what Rhianna had for lunch or whatever was worth it

Better your kids than mine. If you think that’s what is happening on social media your children are screwed.

If you don’t want your kids to have access to social media, then you should definitely stop them. Don’t let them have a smart phone, put it in family mode, etc etc. Asking US states to build the infrastructure of a police state to stop your kids doing things you don’t want is … a ridiculous and dangerous overreaction.

Limiting it for people over 70 would probably do more good

Right, Florida teenagers are totally not going to use social media after this law. It's like everyone commenting on this thread was born yesterday.

This is a form of government control on your devices and eyeballs, nothing else. And considering it is effectively impossible to enforce, the state is soon going to start suing all the tech companies they don't like and push further restrictions/censorship.

>Right, Florida teenagers are totally not going to use social media after this law. It's like everyone commenting on this thread was born yesterday.

I mean they banned drugs and that totally worked, right?

This'll probably have a Streisand effect by making having a secret social media account the cool kids thing and probably add up even more to the societal pressure to get in social media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Ah! The good old party of small government, individual liberties and free market. Well done sticking to your principals sirs and madams!

So the party of small government isn't allowed to make any laws, even for (what they consider, at least) the well-being of society?

This concept that "the other side" can't do anything right is going to be the end of society.

It's the hypocrisy of espousing liberty while systematically stripping away personal rights.

Nice strawman, the political realignment called and says it wants a word with you

The current political realignment is a sign that the voters have no ideological convocation and as such are intellectually bankrupt.

If you are realigning your politics due to trump, you are the problem. All political realignments are bad because they are a sign of a lack of conviction and a decay in a requirement for consistency.

In other news, 2024's 1.2T budget was recently approved.

All roads lead to Rome. Both parties generally seek to expand the scope of the state. Although there are a few Republican senators who lean towards minarchist principles.

Expect the cultural right to demand social media verification to protect the children. The illiberal left might demand ID verification to protect the public from the scourge of dangerous misinformation and hate speech.

The rationalizations will vary for either side of the spectrum. The two goal posts have been positioned. Don't be surprised when the free-kick goes down the middle and Digital ID is presented as a panacea.

https://www.google.com/search?q=digital+ID+site%253Aweforum....

"Small government" doesn't mean what you imply, it means that government exists to fill the gaps and clean up some of the "messiness" created by free markets.

Reasonable regulation and public safety is part of that.

DeSantis has built his brand around protecting kids from institutions. This law is consistent with that.

It’s funny to watch the lefties cope with a good law passed by a Republican

My kids are 19 and 22. I saw them go through this at a time when we just didn't know. Now, I advise friends with young children: you don't want your kids to be the last to get phones, or the first to get phones. But you should be in explicit competition with your fellow parents to be second-to-last. Sort of a Dutch auction situation.

> you don't want your kids to be the last to get phones

Why? Other than maybe bitching and moaning about it, what's the actual harm?

Is there a canonical decision of SCOTUS that children don't have First Amendment rights, and therefore it's OK to restrict their ability to post?

(note that rules which require proof of age tend also to turn into rules that end anonymity, because it's more work to separate the proof systems)

Edit: I ask a question about caselaw and end up at -3? Yes, I know, don't complain about downvotes, but I don't understand these at all.

Yes we already restrict children from doing a ton of things e.g. buying or making pornography

Separate question, though - that's particular kinds of material (and for some reason US caselaw basically doesn't regard anything pornographic as "speech"), while this is a blanket restriction.

If you're 15, you're not allowed in a bar, and you're not allowed on a porn site, and you're not allowed to buy cigarettes.

The list goes on and on.

I fail to see how not being allowed on Facebook is different.

I think the argument is that there are no constitutional rights to bars, cigarettes, and porn. Social media is being held up as an example of "speech" here, which all US citizens are entitled to (at least in theory).

Social media is not “speech” it is a specific type of platform which you also do not have a constitutional right to.

The question is whether the venue in which the speech is performed in is sufficiently public as to be exempt from regulation. Given that participation on these sites exposes participants to heavy commercial advertising, traffic analysis, and data harvesting, I think it's a reasonable stance that the state can regulate participation.

I’m not sure I buy “social media” = “speech”. By that definition, social media companies shouldn’t be able to prevent anyone from using their website for any reason. Being banned for anything would then be equivalent to violating someone’s rights to speech.

Social media companies aren’t required to give a voice to anyone. They are platforms for enabling exercising speech, but they aren’t speech themselves. This seems equivalent to stating that not allowing children in bars or strip clubs violates their right to assembly.

Social media isn't controlled by the government though.

COPPA, a US federal law, has mandated that websites operating under US jurisdiction receive parental consent prior to collecting online information from children under age 13.[1][2]

As far as I'm concerned, this Florida state law practically extends it to children age 16 and under specifically with regards to social media websites and services.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Prot...

[2]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-C...

This is not a blanket restriction it is a ban on social media which a specific thing. Social media != speech it is a product created by a company for profit

Voting.

Driving, buying nicotine/lottery/porn, working, being in school, etc.

Looks like Bethel v. Fraser. 478 U.S. 675. 686 (1986) is the case you're looking for, in which case the court ruled that a school had the right to restrict speech of students (specifically to prevent them from swearing I think).

Here's a discussion of US law as it pertains to children that you might find interesting. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

"Don't complain about downvotes" I think means what it says. Don't complain about them. I have been downvoted when posting a correct solution to a persons technical problem before. It happens. Take it on the chin and move on.

Technical question about free speech. Do you need to have right to see other speech to have free speech? So would it be enough for children to be able to post, but not read? As that would not violate their free speech.

It's not really a free speech question here. For instance, what a student can say in a public school (government tax payer funded) can be restricted to a point, but the courts have ruled that the 1st amendment still protects kids up to a point here. In a private school there are no such protections.

The law here is saying that social media companies are private companies and in order to do business with children they need to follow certain regulations now. This is perfectly normal and legal. For instance, a tavern has certain regulations regarding minors entry to them. There are many examples.

Your question assumes that interacting with social media is a first ammendment right which I don't think is the case. Not sure though. That's likely the reason for the downvotes.

Your comment also has a bit of a "muh free speech" vibe which some people dislike.

Sounds like Mastodon and other ActivityPub enabled services are about to be flooded with Floridian teenagers?

This won't work, 99.9% of parents will just consent. Also, they'll just find another way around it or like I've already seen where they have large imessage groups going.

or use something like internet forums etc.

Well, I'll throw one my customer's ideas out there. "Only validate their age if they're under 16."

Originally, "Only require a middle name when they have one."

What's the definition of social media in this case?

Yeah the definition of "social media" has got to be so loose that it will be a slippery slope law used to enforce ID requirements on all sorts of online applications, from games to instant messengers.

There's no doubt in my mind that this would be healthier for everyone if it panned out. Whether it is legal or enforceable remains to be seen.

At least it’ll encourage the kids to learn a little about computers while they scramble to get around this issue

Would HN be "social media" under this law?

I find it disturbing that both political parties seem to be goose-stepping towards Authoritarianism albeit for different Ideological reasons.

if we really wanna get the kids off social media, we need to bring back thrid places. kids need places where they can meet in person. we dismantled those and the kids went to social media to meet each other.

getting rid of social media without letting them hang out in person is just goin to create an epidemic of social lonliness

a good step forward

but i think it would be both better and easier to make it illegal for < 16 yo's to have a smart phone

the reason being that you can assume that's how they're using social media, so its a pretty good way to stop it, and this doesn't require annoying age or identity verification mechanisms for everyone else

The year of the Lemmy off-shore instances!

To me this has the flavor of adding ratings for a video game or movie, or having porn sites ask if you're over 18 before letting you in. I guess possibly it will do some good (assuming that the implementation isn't crap, which is a stretch), but overall seems like a probable nothingburger in terms of actually being good for young adults' mental well-being. Evidence for the negative impacts of social media on young adults is thin AFAIK, so ultimately seems more like an attempt to cash in on the social-media/trans rights moral panic that DeSantis has built his political brand around.

I do wonder why the bill seeks to restrict users' freedoms, rather than making it illegal to advertise to children in general or something (as many other countries besides the US did decades ago to target children's television). I don't want to impute too much into DeSantis' motivations without evidence, but from where I'm standing it certainly seems like the difference is the model of harm. If your model is: "advertising to children is profitable, so social media will do shady things to keep them engaged to shill them crap" then banning ads makes sense, whereas if it's: "children go on social media/the internet[0], meet new people, and learn that they may be gender non-conforming in some way" then dramatically curtailing their access to the internet seems more effective.

[0] Given the dominance of social media platforms these terms seems basically interchangeable in this context, IMO.

If we could do the same for people 16 and over, the world would be a better place.

I like this. We'll get another generation of anti-authoritarian hackers. These kids will learn to circumvent the laws, and the process will improve both their skills and their philosophy.

I agree with Meta that this should be implemented at an app store level

That seems ridiculous considering virtually all social media is available both as an application, and as a website. App Store controls won’t do anything in regards to usage through the web.

For the web it should be an HTTP header, integrated into the existing parental control systems on the device.

Talk about big government encroaching on personal liberties!

It's a state government restricting minors ...

Suddenly everyone's birthday: 1/1/1111

I support this in theory, but good luck trying to outmaneuver teens on the internet. I foresee a proliferation of age faking tools, VPNs, etc.

If you start fining the social media companies for breaking this law, this problem will be fixed quickly. Your demoralization propaganda is a line perpetuated by these companies to avoid responsibility

> If you start fining the social media companies for breaking this law, this problem will be fixed quickly.

A rational solution that would work? Can't have that, won't have that. Who said this? Stop that person from breathing. (sarcasm folks.)

It's a technical problem that isn't easily solvable though, unless facebook outright bans all VPNs.

decentralized approaches would be resilient to that.

You may be surprised to learn that when asked, teens would actually prefer that everyone give up social media.

The key word is “everyone” and it’s a collective action problem.

Excellent article in The Atlantic titled “End the Phone Based Childhood Now” which covers this extensively.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-...

The study cited in this excellent - but paywalled - article is here: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/2023-131/

I forgot about that, that's huge. A bad Nash equilibrium to the benefit of tech companies and advertisers and the detriment of young people.

Yup. The actual solution here is regulation requiring social media and device manufacturers (networking and user devices like phones) to have simple, accessible, and robust parental controls.

The law proposed here is a stupid hammer that won't do anything but piss everyone off. Definitely what I've come to expect from my worthless state government (I live here, I'm sorry, ive tried to replace these people several times)

> The law proposed here is a stupid hammer that won't do anything but piss everyone off.

Certainly not everyone.

There are many people that back this.

If teens are so so amazing at getting around restrictions why do you propose parental controls? No these companies should be responsible for not letting teens use their platform just as tobacco companies and those selling their products are responsible for not selling to teens. We already have parental controls and this is a do nothing solution which puts the onus on already overwhelmed parents and fixes literally nothing.

We’re looking for actual solutions here, not to check a box and pretend we tried

If they worked, a solid set of device parental controls would let the parent manage their kid's usage of social media without the privacy risks of doing effective age verification.

It'd be a privacy nightmare if everyone ended up sending all the major websites a copy of their passport/driving license to get access.

And policies like "tick box to confirm you're over 18" are a pointless joke.

Probably only a vpn with ip outside Florida required, unless they start verifying the age of everyone.

You only have to disrupt them enough to make them useless to kids. There needs to be a critical mass of users for the social media tool to work. If some kids get through, fine. Liquor stores sell kids with fake IDs alcohol sometimes. But most kids won't be able to get access making the site more or less useless to those that can. Any large enough mass (someone at a school distributes to lots of people at the school) will likely be detected and destroyed.

>kids getting brain less damaged by shorts and tiktoks

We are so back

>id required for more stuff

It's so over

tHe PaRtY of LImIteD goVerNmEnT

Should Republicans only repeal laws? Is that the point you’re struggling to make?

Good. Fuck social media.

I wonder if kids on social media is going to be looked at in a hundred years like we look at kids smoking cigarettes from 100 years ago.

Solution for teens wanting to be in social media: move to a better state lol

If you are saying a better state would allow them on social media, something that has been shown to be detrimental to children under eighteen, how can it be a better state?

Moving to another state is not accessible to most teenagers.

You are probably joking and know that.

This may be one of the rare instances where regulation is not a bad thing.

Social media, especially the recent evolution with shorts, reels and tik-tok, are destroying young minds (and older too).

I'm pretty sure there are millions of people who try to limit their consumption of social media, without any luck - it's just too addictive. If one was able to make a decision - to completely ban for example tik-tok (like make it disappear forever) my feeling is that many people would decide yes. As this is obviously not possible, we all struggle with the overall negative impact.

The law is going to be shot down quickly if it is an undue burden on adults getting access to social media websites and apps.

Doubt. The reigning in of social media companies is one of the few issues with overwhelming bipartisan support

I'm not sure the law enshrines a right for adults to have burden-free access to social media websites and apps. It would be fascinating to be proved wrong about that.

Virtually every tech company has already been sued under Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

What makes you think the state law would get struct down in federal court?

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