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Comment by jiayo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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?

> 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?

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?

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.

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