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Comment by sajithdilshan | Hacker News Reader

This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance.

In the same sense one could argue that social media like Facebook or WhatsApp should be banned among older population because that's one of the major ways mis/fake information being spread among elderly people and now with AI videos they actually believe those fake stories to be 100% true as well. I think that's more risk to modern day democracy and well being of the society in general.

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In theory, libertarian-type approaches seem reasonable when you model for cooperative actors. In practice, however, you hit tragedies of the commons and severe first-mover disadvantages. Well-meaning parents who ban teenagers from social media at the level of the family rather than at the level of society will mainly just socially ostracize their kids. I'd imagine you'd need to go Amish-mode and build a social network on behalf of your kids for anything like this to work.

If you want to restrict kids from social media (which is an open question), I would much prefer that the laws not gate kids from social media directly as this would require social media websites to ask for ID. Rather, abusive parents who don't lock their kids out of social media websites should be sanctioned. First offenders get all of their Internet accesses taken down for a few months.

> will mainly just socially ostracize their kids

Parent of a teen here. This is just flatly false.

If you have been a teenager or adult before, you will be familiar with the concept of the clique. For teens, there are athletes, nerds, theater kids, Lululemon kids, etc.

There are cliques of kids who do not use social media (because their parents won't let them, or they don't want to, or they prefer to do something else, or their parents do not use social media, or they cannot afford the devices). Teens who do not use social media sort into different cliques. That's it. They are not ostracized any more than theater kids or computer geeks are ostracized. (The latter inclusion was intentional, as it may cause some self-reflection among well-adjusted adults who at one time were members of school computer clubs.)

Fairly recent teen here. This is simply not true. All my friends who started adamantly against social media had Instagram come end of senior year. At college, I could count on one hand the amount of people I met without it.

I know personally, I was never entirely without social media, but I switched to iPhone because I was so tired of being ostracized with regard to iMessage (this was pre-RCS, perhaps this particular concern has been alleviated)

Sure I guess all the Android users could band together and form a clique and maybe that happened to some extent, but I didn’t wish to associate as an Android user. I don’t imagine kids want “social media Luddite” to be their clique. I wanted to be an outdoorsy kid with tech interests at the most. My choice of phone brand isn’t a part of this identity.

Noted. We have granted an exception for iMessage on the grounds that communications are primarily/wholly with people known IRL.

There's an analogy for older folks, which is kids who grew up without TVs (and radio, in some cases). I am friends with a number of such folks, and they are just fine. I would imagine they too were "ostracized" because they were largely disconnected from pop culture. I imagine they didn't like the situation when they were younger, but it did not damage them like people suggest will happen to kids without access to Instagram.

(Noting also here that as early as tweens, the kids have been using all kinds of stuff as social media sites. Obviously Google Docs etc. But also any unblocked site on the Internet with a textbox, including Asana, Monday, etc. Anywhere with an image upload can be social media.)

> At college, I could count on one hand the amount of people I met without it.

I'm in the US, will say that most students here are over the age of 16 by the time they arrive at college so this would not apply to them.

Would love to get your thoughts on people who "have" social media vs people who abuse (or whatever you want to call it) social media. Is this like cigarettes, where having an account is too much, or more like sweets that can be enjoyed in moderation?

> Would love to get your thoughts on people who "have" social media vs people who abuse (or whatever you want to call it) social media. Is this like cigarettes, where having an account is too much, or more like sweets that can be enjoyed in moderation?

Erm, I feel most comfortable with an analogy to alcohol, perhaps. It has a high capacity to be abused yet is used in moderation by almost everyone. It’s almost incontestably physically harmful yet I still, of my own accord (as contrasted with nicotine which is addictive), choose to partake because there are benefits which I find valuable. I find social events much more enjoyable after a few drinks.

You can measure all these different harms of social media but I do think there are social benefits which are harder to quantify despite the companies who make the platforms being exploitive. It’s nice to see what my friends are doing. It’s nice to have a new avenue to hold conversations with new and old friends, far and near. I know that at points it’s taken a toll on me but today, despite considering myself to be fairly enlightened to the whole situation, I still continue to partake in social platforms and would likely reluctantly allow my children to do the same (I never really had open dialogue with my parents about social media, alcohol, and all these other vices. I turned out alright but I’d like to be there in that sort of sense for my children if I wind up having them in a way that differs to how my parents were.)

> Rather, abusive parents who don't lock their kids out of social media websites should be sanctioned. First offenders get all of their Internet accesses taken down for a few months.

Wow, people really will advocate for anything except actually fixing the harmful aspects of these sites.

Also, calling parents "abusive" who let their kids on social media is harsh and will likely only ever push people away from understanding your position.

What happens after the second offence, out of curiosity?

We absolutely do need regulation of this harm by the law. It's how we stand together as a society, otherwise one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents. There's plenty of precedent in other threshold ages at which children can start indulging in other potentially harmful vices.

The vulnerable elder population is more difficult to define by a simple age threshold. We all decline at different ages and different rates.

I disagree

> one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents.

So what is wrong with that? parenting is not equal among all parents in UK and why should only this aspect be normalized?

> The vulnerable elder population is more difficult to define by a simple age threshold. We all decline at different ages and different rates.

This is a hypocritical statement. For children we are more than willing to normalize and enforce rules as us adults wants because we assume all children grow up at same age and same rates, but when it comes to policing adults, the line is gray and more difficult because everyone is different.

"Can I learn to drive?" "No, you're not old enough" "But my friend is already driving and he's 12" "OK, when you turn 12 you can too."

I'm sorry but the parent in this conversation is just stupid.

As they say, you can't fix stupid.

The parent in your conversation is just stupid and no matter how many laws we pass we cannot fix stupidity.

In that case only thing I can suggest is to pass a law to assess the eligibility and maturity of people if they want to have children and issue a permit if they are suitable to have and raise children and otherwise they cannot have children.

> one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parent.

And that would be a great oportunity to teach that child that those measures exist for a reason.

The government is and must always be a subsidiary actor.

Not every risk must be addressed, otherwise zebra crossings would not exist, or driving would be prohibited.

Driving is prohibited until a certain age. Parents don't get to discuss this with their child and decide when they're old enough.

Complete digression I know...

Driving on public roads is prohibited until a certain age.

That age is 17 here in the UK but me and many of my friends growing up in a rural area learned to drive from the age of 14 or 15 on private land. Our parents would take us there/back, provide the car and be our "instructor". Some friends who lived on farms had cars/trucks/etc of their own that they could use to drive around and their parents were fine to let us try too. But we knew that we were never allowed on public roads.

By the time we all got to 17 we applied for our tests and had a few lessons with an real instructor on real public roads. We still had to learn all of the rules/etiquette/etc but most of us where completely happy with the physical aspects of controlling the vehicle, that saved us a huge amount of time.

My kid is 15 and if a suitable opportunity arises I'll let them have a go behind the wheel (not illegally obviously). Unfortunately I live in a city not a rural area, and don't own a car, so there hasn't been the chance yet.

(In the UK land like a supermarket car park is still considered as public roads despite being privately owned. Generally anywhere where the public can access it easily is not considered "private" in terms of the Road Traffic Act.)

> There's plenty of precedent in other threshold ages at which children can start indulging in other potentially harmful vices.

Yeah but, there's no precedent for regulating something that parents are opting into (by buying their kids devices and then turning them loose with no oversight).

We should be punishing liquor stores when a parent willingly buys their child alcohol, then?

> one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents

That’s how it has been for most everything. Someone else’s parents let their kids watch TV on a school night, or stay up past 10pm, or has a curfew of 1am instead of midnight, or lets them drink soda at the dinner table. The response from my parents to me, and from me to my kids, has always been to point out that families are different, they have different rules, and that in this house we do X.

If we need regulation of "this harm", then what we need to be regulating is the social media networks, not the children (and adults!) that use them.

We need to be banning algorithmic feeds. We need to be banning promotion of hateful content. We need to be banning moderation that is biased against marginalized groups, or against criticism of the platform.

If they weren't being subjected to feeds specifically designed to create maximum "engagement" with fear, hate, and self-doubt, most young people using social media would be interacting in similar ways to how they interact offline. Perhaps there would be a little less inhibition due to the feeling of anonymity, but overall, anything harmful they might be doing or saying to each other on there is very similar to what they would be doing or saying to each other in person, regardless of what social media you let them access.

> We absolutely do need regulation of this harm by the law

> There's plenty of precedent in other threshold ages at which children can start indulging in other potentially harmful vices.

In those other vices, we have various other regulations in order to reduce their harm as much as possible. Yet, there has been no similar push for the purported harm done by social media - or, apparently, the Internet in general. It's like we've tried nothing and are surprised it's still an issue.

Nice opinion. Are you a parent? What if most voting age parents want this law?

Why does that mean people who don't want this law's privacy gets to be invaded? How is this not those parents' responsibility to ensure their child doesn't go on those sites they don't like?

Every single right you have can be taken away by the justification of it will protect children or it is wrong because of something some person wrote in a religious text.

Parents who think they need this are bad parents and bad citizens.

Someone pointed out that every single one of these laws in spirit does not need the website to verify and block the user. There is no need for complicated schemes of all websites implementing complex screening software and storing all our IDs. The website could report a single string saying if there is adult content and software the parent or authoritarian governments ISP has installed on the device could block it.

But protecting children isn't the point

Yup. We already have <meta name="rating" content="adult"> for this reason. Very conveniently ignored.

The fact of me being a parent is non of your concern I would say.

If most of voting age parents want this, then what prevents them from enforcing it on their children. Why do they have to rely on government to be the parent. Maybe those parent should not have been parents in the first place if they need government to step in to raise their children.

They should be able to discipline their kids, if not, then it means that they're not capable parents and social services should be called on them.

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