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Comment by arlattimore | Hacker News Reader

While I appreciate the sentiment of this legislation, removing social media access for everyone under 16 years to address the concerns of a few is a nanny state act. As a parent, you should be making these decisions for your children - not your government. Additionally, I would suggest it won't address the actual issue. The named/identified social media companies will comply as required, younger internet users will simply go elsewhere (the internet is a big place after all) and therefore the problem will ultimately go unaddressed.

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It is undeniable that big tech has warped the way even adults deal with each other. It warps social norms, social habits, human interactions, perspectives on the world and a lot more, all for the worse than the better.

For children, it is very important for them to build their social skills based on interactions with other kids and adults, rather than from social media. They must learn about the world from the world, rather than through a commercial filtered lens of a big tech company, that is focussed on clicks, views and profits.

True, its a nanny state move. But, in my view, it is absolutely essential, as big tech seldom seems to worry about their products and their effects on children.

Sometimes, when the problem is big, the action must also be big.

> It is undeniable that big tech has warped the way even adults deal with each other. It warps social norms, social habits, human interactions, perspectives on the world and a lot more, all for the worse than the better.

Also true for television. Old Media had the monopoly on opinion-guidance back then. Part of the (encouragement of the) negative reaction to social media is it's threat to the status quo, much like Australia's previous legislation to force Facebook and Google to pay old media for linking to their news articles.

Different groups of people will have different lists of things they don't like about society and where it's headed; violent video games, advertising, music videos (that tend to be soft-porn these days), internet browsing tracking. Where does a government draw the line on what to act on and what to leave to the responsibility of parents? (how does this help other agendas? Will this look like we're "doing something"? Will this score votes? which way is the breeze blowing on this topic?)

Social media is a concentrator. I'm not convinced it's a 'cause'. There seems to be an epidemic of (social) anxiety, and maybe Facebook is the cause, but to me it feels societally deeper. World leadership is demonstrably not "the best of us" (I'm not just saying that because of Trump), to me, it feels as if there's a pervasive attitude of "I'll get mine and fuck the rest of you", which predictably trickles throughout the society whose leaders portray that attitude. Social media being one outlet of this, but I see plenty of 'us vs. them' polemics in traditional media.

Just my theory. I'm already poking holes in it mentally, but anyway. I don't have any useful answers. I guess we'll see if this ban makes a difference.

I think it has the potential to basically ruin society as we know it, the amount of hysteria, hype, division, lies, distraction and hate it breeds is enormous.

I look at some of the stuff on Reddit, especially some of the right wing stuff, it's actually alarming the stuff people say, and believe on there. I know they are extreme examples but holy shit.

The ability to amplify falsehoods and certain narratives is ridiculous.

I remember reading 1984, and being terrified, some of the stuff I read in online communities makes me at least that scared and worse.

> It warps social norms, social habits, human interactions, perspectives on the world and a lot more, all for the worse than the better.

See Penny Arcade's "John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory":

* https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

It's very hard for parent to resist the insistent demands of their children to get a smartphone when their classmates all have one, and not having one means being or feeling excluded. This is the kind of coordination problem better solved by regulation.

If you're not going to police that smartphone then how will this legislation do anything? What stops "US Mastodon" being the new place all the kids in your school are posting?

Like that is the goal here, because observably any phone with a web browser has social media access, it just can't be a company which tries to do business in Australia directly.

But 4chan has existed for years (that's not the end point, but certainly creating a selective pressure to push teenagers to less regulated, shadier social media services doesn't seem like it's quite the result people want).

The short version I'd say is, this move seems solely aimed at taking away a virtual third space for adolescents and doesn't plan to offer anything back. But people didn't go seeking it because it offered nothing.

Adolescents shouldn't have a non-anonymous presence on the internet.

> It's very hard for parent to resist the insistent demands of their children to get a smartphone when their classmates all have one, and not having one means being or feeling excluded. This is the kind of coordination problem better solved by regulation.

But they banned "social media" not smartphones. If they actually banned smartphones, this regulation would be much easier to enforce.

But by just banning a select few apos, kids are just going to move onto the next app.

And not only that, it only bans kids from having an account, they can still view content while logged out.

So Im going to bet that this not be effective, not be enforcable.

...and no one talks about a toxic effect of comousory education in this context: your child is locked together with children whose parents you would never be friends with because of conflicting values.

maybe the peer pressure for phones issue would look completely different without compulsory education.

You can cast any regulation as a "nanny state act". Life is more complicated than that.

The ability of individuals to be aware and take conscious action against harmful behaviors is clear and should be used when possible. But that ability gets exhausted very fast in a hyperspecialized and complicated world. Most parents are digitally illiterate, can't protect even themselves online, let alone their kids.

Delegating to collective institutions that can pool the required expertise and weigh-in the pros and cons is the means to empower individuals to better handle these hard to evaluate risks.

If our institutions really dont produce good regulation the obvious thing to do is check and fix that, taking into account that the complaints about over-regulation, bad regulation etc. might be by the offenders or aspiring abusers that have something to lose.

Is there a time when you would find "nanny state" to be a useful concept? What would make that situation different to the social media ban?

I think the answer in implicit in my comment: When all the affected individuals can readily make their own judgement about the risks and benefits of their choices (1) they have all the relevant information, (2) they are able to comprehend it and (3) they can act on it using a menu of options.

99% of people are entirely clueless as to what happens behind the scenes in social media platforms because the information is not there, and it is doubtful they would be able to evaluate it anyway. Plus, there are hardly any differentiated alternatives available.

So when these conditions are not met, anybody throwing around terms like "nanny state" has ulterior motives to exploit vulnerable populations (ignorant, addicted, low information, trapped etc.) for their own gain.

Which is "fine" or at least understandable, moral values are not universal. But lets make clear the starkly different visions.

If TV were to be banned under similar reasoning would you believe that to be justified? TV programming is similarly opaque to the social media algorithms.

There are many TV channel alternatives, public TV is pretty transparent and there are regulations around when various programs would air, obligatory reporting of age suitability etc.

> There are many TV channel alternatives

There are many social medias

> public TV is pretty transparent

In what manner? As a kid I didn't know that the pokemon cartoon existed in order to make me buy trading cards.

Even in news there is an army of editors and producers making decisions all of the time. This leads to things like the state media adding sound effects to footage to make it more sensational and then after losing in court investigating themselves and finding no intentional wrongdoing [1]!

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/05/abc-editorial-...

Australia has always been a nanny state though. Not even letting some games or movies in to the country because they think it's inappropriate for adults to consume for example. Ridiculous.

Curing addictions is very hard and some addictions are very strong. Some addictions are also guarded by business interests leveraging close to a trillion dollars to increase this addiction.

We didn't reduce smoking through personal responsibility, stop using "nanny state" tropes.

In democracies the government is an imperfect representation of the will of the people and sometimes it decides individuals can't fight some things.

Good point bringing up smoking. Why don’t they just make smoking illegal in every country ? Because it’s impractical. Same as this law.

And yet the things they have done have gone a long way to reducing the real harms caused by smoking.

A 5% spread of harm in a population is better than spread across 80% or 90%, etc. Taking action to reduce the surface area of harm, even if 0% is impractical, is beneficial to a functioning society.

I agree parents should have the choice for kids using social media, but this example of impracticality is a bit off: cigarettes are illegal for kids in nearly all developed countries.

Smoking is also highly regulated now. It’s almost a surprise to see someone smoking nowadays.

And yet over half my high school year smoked, and I was absolutely peer pressured to start.

The point of smoking is about the origins of the term 'nanny state' [0]:

[0]: https://wordhistories.net/2020/10/03/nanny-state/

> Why don’t they just make smoking illegal in every country ? Because it’s impractical.

Is that also the reason they don't make cocaine illegal in every country?

I find it uncomfortable that so many of the arguments focus on practicality and that so few focus on liberty. It almost seems like a forgotten concept.

The idea is to make a group decision to stop all the kids from using social media rather then get your kid alienated by just blocking him. Some people on hackernews want their kids to have zero friends and play SNES games but that's not what we should aim for.

“Nanny state” is fine when you’re talking about children.

Did you even read the parent comment?

> As a parent, you should be making these decisions for your children - not your government.

Alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex, driving and many other things are heavily regulated for children. Should a parent be able to allow his 12yo daughter to drink, smoke or marry 40yo guy? We're living in a society. Social media is just another item in the list.

I’ve seen many people make comparisons between these things and the social media ban, but I actually think they’re quite poor comparisons.

The main concern is around enforcement, which is still TBD for this ban. I assume you mean illicit drugs which are banned for everyone so I’ll skip that as it’s not relevant. For sex/marriage, these are basically not enforced until people notice or they cause a problem so again are not relevant. Driving is an interesting one but I’ll come back to it. The closest comparison here is alcohol and tobacco.

For alcohol and tobacco sales the rule of thumb staff are trained on in Australia is if the customer looks younger than 25 they ask for ID. The customer present their ID, the cashier visually checks the DoB, and the sale goes through. This does not affect the majority of Australians who either do not smoke or drink, or look old enough that no ID check is done. Enforcement for a social media ban would be onerous on all Australians who use social media (I don’t have numbers but I’m sure it’s more more than (smokers ∪ drinkers)) plus the scope for potential abuse or infringement of rights is far greater. Compare this to social media. How would such a ban be enforced? The kids are not stupid, they will find a way around whatever the enforcement mechanism is. So either the enforcement will be a) trivially circumventable to the point where the legislation is completely useless for its ostensible purpose, or b) devolve into an endless cat-and-mouse game trampling Australians’ rights every step of the way. Depending on how eager the Aus gov is to enforce this it could easily extend to VPN bans, destruction of anonymity online, and yet more means to eliminate free speech. These things are all extremely important for a functional society where people, especially vulnerable and marginalised people, can speak up without fear of retaliation. A cashier checking your ID at the shop is nowhere near the top of a slope as steep, nor slippery as this.

Driving is a really interesting comparison here actually. I’m not sure I would be opposed to a social media license. In the same way the purpose of a license is to ensure that road users can do so in a safe manner, maybe something similarly focused on education would be more helpful here than a ban. I’ve actually long blamed a kind of tragedy of the commons for the sorry state of the modern internet. Most users are simply not savvy enough to know better than to use it in all but the dumbest ways, fall for the dumbest scams, and basically allow themselves to be corralled like cattle into the sterile advertiser-friendly pens big tech companies have constructed for them. So in anger I’ve sometime said we should only allow licensed users online. Anyway that’s a bit off topic but a social media license is an interesting concept.

By that logic expecting citizens to stop at traffic light or expecting them to not violate speed limits is a nanny state act.

"to address the concerns of a few"

lol

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