Norway to increase minimum age limit on social media to 15 to protect children | Hacker News Reader

Norway to increase minimum age limit on social media to 15 to protect children

theguardian.com

79 pointsmiles55 comments

> The Scandinavian country already has a minimum age limit of 13 in place. Despite this, more than half of nine-year-olds, 58% of 10-year-olds and 72% of 11-year-olds are on social media, according to research by the Norwegian media authority.

I think my life today would be significantly better if I hadn’t been exposed to unsupervised internet access at around 10 years old with the Nintendo DSi web browser. Who knows how people growing up on TikTok brain-rot streams will turn out. I don’t look back fondly on my early experiences with the internet.

This is interesting because I had the opposite experience… though I think I’m a little older than you. Maybe the internet was more innocent in my time.

In any case, I feel like this is definitely needed now. I wouldn’t want to grow up as a child with the current rampant social media use among young people. I feel like I got out just in time as the fat was closing.

The popular internet was very innocent in the 90s and early 00s. Much less addiction and anxiety-inducing, which are gateways into depression. Though in the 00s, the internet also had a lot of shock content if you strayed just a bit from the golden path. I think some of the things I have seen as a kid significantly worsened my childhood.

But it was better overall. Seeing shock content is like eating a spoon of salt. The mind has defence mechanisms for it. You consume it, you are disgusted, and you never want to do it again. Consuming social media is like eating fast food. Sure, you’re less happy after you eat it, but it’s not awful, and maybe you can imagine buying another burger in the future. Which one does more damage? A constant diet of fast food or a spoon of salt once? I also heard some drug addicts talk about how they tried the hard street drugs but the consequences were about as bad as the high was good, so they didn’t get addicted to them. Instead, they first got addicted to mild ones.

The internet is worse these days because it gets us addicted in a very pleasant way. It is fun, and consuming social media or news media on it seems like a way to be informed and in touch with current events. But then slowly people develop cravings. Now they are a bit anxious if they miss a day, there is fear of missing out. And now they’re a bit anxious if they spend only a few minutes a day. And then maybe an hour is not enough to keep up with everything that’s happening online. If everyone’s first experience of the social media was clockwork orange style 12-hour blast of forced doomscrolling tied to a chair, then fewer people would get addicted. But because the negative effects are so mild, the internet and social/news media are insidiously addictive in a way the way they were not 20 years ago.

We teach our children not to do drugs, and to keep healthy diets. But we let them hang out with the drug dealer and fast food restaurant stand-ins (people and companies in the business of addiction) online without supervision in most cases. Many will fall into addiction in those circumstances.

P.S. Another example is the proverbial boiling frog. Put it into hot water and it will hop out to save its life. But condition the water just right and turn up the heat just slowly enough, and it will happily boil.

The internet was mostly a beautiful place in the early 00s. At the same time if you were looking for terrible things (and I mean the worst things) they were easy to find which really is no longer the case. You have to be on private channels/onion sites/freenet etc. to find those things now.

> At the same time if you were looking for terrible things (and I mean the worst things) they were easy to find which really is no longer the case.

I think that this is true. I have friends tell me they children blown to bits on Instagram. I’ve also heard that the experience of creating a new X account shows grim content before it grow accustomed to your preferences.

I had entirely opposite experience. At 10, I was hanging around irc where folks made various adult jokes but were very friendly and helpful. Getting mod was a dream! Also, I learned most of my shell-fu from irc. I also spent some time roaming around other generic channels but a lot of those were barren lands.

It took me many years before my parents got tired of computer at home hype and just left it alone and I reined over it and installed linux and tried to figure out how to get around. There were days, when I would install windows, print some docs(or if printer went out of ink, wrote the docs by hand on my school notebooks), reinstalled linux, tried things until I got stuck.

There were plenty other interesting things but I still cherish my irc days.

No offense intended but it makes me wonder what your social life was like and is like. Internet is not a substitute for a social life and it seems to me that early exposure to the internet stunts your social growth significantly.

I grew up in the 2000s-2010s with little restriction on internet access and don't regret one bit. Because of this I was able to make friends from all over the world (Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America, though nobody from Africa) via social media, and self-teach myself programming, art, math, and whatever else interested me. We can't leave out the benefits of social media access from this conversation either.

Very different environment back then. The content was minimal, lower quality, less engaging and there were no sophisticated algorithms. It's been finely tuned to be addictive in the last 15 years and can suck users in for hours and keep them up all night with endless content streams and dopamine hits. I also grew up in the 2000s era and am not disillusioned to think myspace and Facebook were in the same universe as TikTok and Instagram of today. The negatives for kids far outweigh the positives at this point.

The Scandinavian demo scene called, they need new recruits...

Yeah, my thought was "This would actually have banned the demoscene", because BBSes were social media in every sense - and people also got effectively addicted to them. The newspapers were full of stories of kids who had stayed up all night and run up an immense phone bill.

This is getting ridiculous, if you believe that social media is an unequivocal bad then ban it for everyone. Adults have no more defenses against its evils than children. It doesn't become less harmful the moment you turn 16/18/21. Laws voted on by group A that only affect group B should be under high scrutiny because there's no natural feedback mechanism— "it seems like a good idea but I wouldn't to live under it."

As grown-ups I think we all know we need this and want this to happen but as grown-ups used to an unconstrained space to talk, we don't agree about some of the unavoidable consequences. To anonymity. to identity. to the role of government and private industry and governance in the wide. LEA want this, but also want outcomes we as users may not be so keen about.

I think this is a good move. The exposure to flagging, likes and groupthink on social media is insane and you have it 24h a day as opposed to group pressures lasting for the duration you sit in school.

As I understand it, children can still use the Internet, just not the addictive version of it.

We carry these phones around with us at all times of the day. It's almost akin to carrying a pill on you at all times with instant effects. Is the average person's psychology and will strong enough to resist this? What if they heavily used social media from 12-18 years old? What if they were an iPad kid? To basically run this Social Media Experiment on an entire generation might not be so wise but I guess we'll see. Hopefully we don't get an MBA study in 10 years finding that anyone born 2005-2015 is 20% less productive. Maybe AI will just fill that gap though haha so we might get bailed out if this would be the case.

I know that a significant amount of high schoolers "go to bed" at 11pm, then scroll until they pass out at 2am. Maybe we can have a law that makes social media companies restrict their own app usage after 12am in their local time. Is someone going to argue they want themselves or their kid to have the ability to sacrifice the next day (and their growth/health) for some late night scrolling?

Or perhaps a law that forces operating systems to restrict all social media consumption after a certain period. Limiting everyone (or just minors) to only a few hours of content consuming dopamine a day. Overall happiness and GDP might just go up haha and does anyone spend 4 hours scrolling and say that was time well spent?

Experiencing life and using/growing your brain is literally the opposite of using social media. Would Einstein have overcome social media to still do everything he did? Maybe he would have used it to his advantage.

There's also the problem of group think and conformity that really is a dangerous thing with social media comments paired with a society score (upvote count). That's another discussion altogether and very interesting to think about any effects from that. I like to remind myself that in 50 years it's this generation that will be running the world.

I remain surprised and disappointed at how many technologists seem to be agreeing with this, nodding to a textbook example of "think of the children" rhetoric, supported by anecdotal evidence and obvious failures to distinguish between correlation and causation [1].

It's very telling that Toppe treats privacy concerns as just something for the nerds to handle ("et lenger lerret å bleke" [2]) rather than a fundamental risk introduced by any attempt to implement this in a centralized fashion - with the Norwegian government already relegating important authentication to banks [3], I remain confident that any attempt to implement this will be 1. trivially circumventable 2. annoying as shit to the average user 3. an increased risk to kids trying to escape abusive situations 4. a farce akin to the UK porn passes [4]

I wish a fraction of this effort could have gone into maintaining good online spaces which don't relegate moderation to the first BERT classifier available off HuggingFace or remote workers being paid next to nothing. Aftenposten getting their FB posts deleted in 2016 [5] could have been an excellent time to start a discussion about not hitching Norway's digital infrastructure to ad companies, but they didn't - and now we are left with people assuming that social media necessarily has to handle bullying and advertising in a shitty way, because the big sites deliberately design towards the lightest possible automated/piecemeal moderation for hundreds of millions of users.

[1] e.g. "my depressed kid is on the phone all day, because The Algorithms(TM) are beaming depression into their head, rather than providing an outlet for them"

[2] https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/mPzg0q/regjeringen-vil-innfoere-...

[3] Yes, there is MinID, but many services require BankID, turning the first few weeks for people immigrating - _before_ they have a Norwegian bank account - into an absolute barrel of laughs

[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/porn-passes-...

[5] https://www.nrk.no/kultur/aftenposten-sin-facebook-kritikk-f...

Social Media is a risk to all of us, not just kids. I think it's very reductive to frame this as a "think of the children" moment.

We have very little understanding of the impact of an always on skinner box/rage box, and I think it's fair to want to understand more about how that could impact developing minds and to be more cautious about how we deploy systems that could be significant harms.

Frankly, I'd support more restrictions for adults as well as kids (though I'd frame it more around regulating what interactions social media can offer.)

> Social Media is a risk to all of us, not just kids. I think it's very reductive to frame this as a "think of the children" moment.

The activist movement championing the age limit are explicitly framing the issue (as Haidt does) as social media use directly leading to worse mental health markers in children and teens, and arguing that this harm is so great that any proposal claiming to fix it should be implemented, consequences be damned - exactly the kind of "think of the children" argument that gets people to argue against end-to-end encryption.

> We have very little understanding of the impact of an always on skinner box/rage box, and I think it's fair to want to understand more about how that could impact developing minds and to be more cautious about how we deploy systems that could be significant harms. > (though I'd frame it more around regulating what interactions social media can offer.)

I argue that the problem is that advertisement and VC funding are fundamentally antithetical to making good spaces for discussion. Making a good space requires moderators who are invested in participating themselves while being conscious of their role - the kind of work where the workload scales linearly with users, but the expected accuracy and severity of screwing up grows more rapidly. However, your investors want more users and eyeballs on ads as fast as possible, while making moderation work as cheap as possible.

Social sites don't have to be "always-on Skinner boxes", but it comes down to technical and organizational decisions and whether you are willing to treat discussion spaces as a common good which don't need to run with billions in profits

Personally, in the face of skyrocketing depression rates since right at the advent of smartphones, and plummeting birth rates, with no actually plausible alternative culprit offered, ya I'm gonna start with the 10 hours of screens people are spending most of their waking hours on.

> skyrocketing depression rates

Again people conflate correlation and causation very easily here, and don't account for changes in how mental health conditions are coded, see https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-coddling-of-the-american-p...

> no plausible alternative culprit offered [for plummeting birth rates]

"More than half the drop in America’s total fertility rate is explained by women under the age of 19 now having next to no children. Around a third of the missing births would have been unplanned, and the majority of them would have been to women on low incomes."

https://archive.ph/cJY3B

> plummeting birth rates

People not wanting to have kids has zero to do with smartphones. More to do with one more kid costing a lot of money, time, making it unable for you to socialize or have hobbies etc etc.

When people wanted to have a lot of kids, it was the situation where women had no employment options, kids were expected to help you and care in old age, kids being expected to be deferential even in adult age and expectations on parenting were lower. And people had many kids when anticonception was not available.

None of that is something we should get back to. Kids were mistreated a lot as a result, whole setup calls for it. And some of the people who decide to not have kids, actually should not have kids because they would be awful parents.

The Surgeon General's report on social media and youth mental health [0] cited 3 studies showing 1) that limiting social media to 30 minutes per day among college students for 3 weeks significantly reduced loneliness and depression [1], 2) deactivating Facebook before the 2018 midterm elections increased subjective wellbeing and reduced political polarization,[2] and 3) that 10,904 14-year-olds in the UK Millennium Cohort Study experienced an increase in depressive symptoms in association with greater daily social media use, with a stronger association for girls than boys (depressive symptoms in adolescents using social media for 3 to <5 h versus 1-3 hours daily were elevated 21% in boys and 26% in girls; with 5 or more hours of use versus 1-3 hours of use daily, depressive symptom scores were elevated 35% in boys and 50% in girls) [3].

Fully 57% of high school aged girls--(more than half!)--experienced feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2021, up from 36% in 2011 [4]. Over the same timeframe, average time spent using social media each day among teens doubled from about 1.5 hours to more than 3 hours [5]. Admittedly, this is not a straightforward association as mental health screening practices changed in the United States during this period.

The actions of some with a vested financial interest in continued growth of social media have purposely chosen not to protect youth mental health. According to CBS, Mark Zuckerberg, "personally and repeatedly thwarted initiatives meant to improve the well-being of teens on Facebook and Instagram...[overruling] Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri and President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, who had asked Zuckerberg to do more to protect the more than 30 million teens who use Instagram in the United States" [6]. And now developed countries with robust regulation systems are starting to do something. If all of this is happening and there is "not enough evidence" all one has to do is look back at similar statements by the tobacco and asbestos industries to muddle, obfuscate, and confuse to continue extraction of profits as long as possible. If you are working for social media companies in these efforts, at least try a new tactic to continue extraction of wealth at the expense of public health! It has become too obvious at this point.

0. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-heal...

1. https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751

2. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658

3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

4. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Sum...

5. https://images.nature.com/lw1200/magazine-assets/d41586-023-...

6. https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/zuckerberg-rejected-...

honestly fair, but unenforceable in non ultra authoritarian govs

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