Comment by strangecasts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by strangecasts | Hacker News Reader

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...

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.

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

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