France targets Australia-style social media ban for children next year
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"Pleasant for kids to use is the polar opposite of kids finding it a pleasure to use"
Children haven’t changed.
Liking carrots doesn't negate your taste for ice cream.
(Unfortunately I'm well aware that it won't last long, because social pressure is impossible to fight at individual scale)
When you make learning synonymous with fun people start to believe that if they aren't having fun they aren't learning. Which accounts I think for something that a lot of teachers at all levels have observed, kids are increasingly unable to learn if there's no immediate reward.
It's much worse than just greed, it's about attention. Fundamentally at this point, very few people, including adults are unable to accept boredom or lack of instant gratification. Commercial or non-commercial.
It’s ID verification.
I don't want to be forced to doxx myself just because some parents can't control their children.
In Holland there's even ISPs that filter porn and stuff, like https://kliksafe.nl . They're used by ultra-religious conservative communities (calvinists). Even adults use it there.
I view this as a much better solution. The people that want it can do their blocking and the rest of us aren't bothered with verifications and stuff.
Personally I belong to the sex-positive movement which thinks diametrically opposite about such matters :)
Provide a solution which doesn’t require that, like some other top commenter did. Otherwise, you have already lost.
The primary difference is that back then there was strong parental supervision and guidance.
Ad driven online content is especially bad for kids. But let's not pretend the only way to find an alternative is to end the world.
The fact is the "bad" solution is popular because consumers say they care about these things but then in real life they act like they don't. If no one watched the problem would solve itself. Thus, I'm not sure the solution is even to be found in platforms, if parents are burned out or don't have ways to make better choices for their kids.
That's a reason for these laws, to essentially just take it out of people's hands.
What makes this impossible is the scale that people assume you need to cater for. When you limit your population to a reasonable size then moderation is easy and everyone gets to know the expectations of the community.
Unfortunately we have built a world in which people can live stream terrorist attacks or child rape.
I would rather have my kid watch nothing but AI slop then get even 30 seconds of FAUX news. Lost my father to actual brain rot, FUCK YOU NEWSCORP!
1. A private company, let's call it AgeVerify, issues scratch-off cards with unique tokens on them. They are basically like gift cards.
2. AgeVerify's scratch-off cards are sold exclusively in IRL stores. Preferably liquor stores, adult stores, and/or tobacco/vape shops. Places that are licensed and check ID.
3. Anyone who wants to verify their age online can purchase a token at a store. The store must only demand ID if the buyer appears to be a minor (similar to alcohol or tobacco purchases). The store must never store the ID in any form whatsoever.
4. Giving or selling these tokens to a minor is a criminal offense. If a store does it, they lose their liquor or tobacco license. Treat it just like giving a minor alcohol or tobacco.
4a. Run public service announcement campaigns to communicate that giving an AgeVerify token to a child is like handing them a cigarette. There should be a clear social taboo associated with the legal ban.
5. The buyer of the AgeVerify token enters it into their account on whatever social media or adult website they want to use. The website validates the code with AgeVerify.
6. Once validated, the code is good for 1 year (or 6 months or 3 months, adjust based on how stringent you want to make it) - then it expires and a new one must be purchased.
7. A separate token is required for each website/each account.
8. The website is responsible for enforcing no account sharing.
No identifying information is stored anywhere. Kids find it very hard to access age-restricted materials online, just like the vast majority of kids don't easily have access to alcohol or cigarettes.
Your idea will create a massive black market for “adult validation tokens”, handing billions of dollars to criminal groups reselling these things.
And then where such a system goes in 5-10y. Sure it’s sorta anonymous today, but then new government decides - “let’s make it mandatory to be sold with a binding identity and credit card.” Suddenly you need that token to log in to any public website. And Chinese, European and American authorities demand realtime access to the global logs.
Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about. Don't design or build oppression technology.
The very idea that you can realistically enforce Point of Sales age checks at scale is not sensible.
No bigger than the current black market for beer and cigs for kids. Adults have no need to resort to black markets. They can buy this stuff legitimately.
> Sure it’s sorta anonymous today, but then new government decides - “let’s make it mandatory to be sold with a binding identity and credit card.”
They're already trying to do that right now! If we can head them off with a system that's as robust as age verification for alcohol we take away the moderate voter's support for making everyone upload passports to access FaceTok.
> Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about
Hasn't happened to cigs or booze so far. How long is "eventually"?
> The very idea that you can realistically enforce Point of Sales age checks at scale is not sensible.
This needs strong evidence. My evidence is that we already do it for many products.
> Suddenly you need that token to log in to any public website. And Chinese, European and American authorities demand realtime access to the global logs
If you treat everything as a potential slippery slope you won't get anything done. Right now the threat is governments mandating actual ID and destroying everyone's anonymity under the guise of protecting the children. I fear they have the votes to ram it through. Unless we find a good enough alternative that preserves privacy.
I don't think this part is true. Kids are currently used to having access to all of these services. And there is a lot more utility to having access to the whole internet, than having a a few packs.
To say nothing of the fact that these codes can be distributed digitally once they have been purchased. So it's harder to deter.
How do the kids pay for them?
You can’t nerd harder and solve this problem. You have to fight these ideas at the root, and you my friend are being the so called “useful idiot” by raising and supporting such oppression and censorship.
Well, you are correct. But you see people want to have a sense of control, so they think that doing SOMETHING is better that nothing, not realizing that often in some situations,s inaction is the best course of action. Among other examples where I think inaction is good are free markets and many cancer treatments.
If you think you can fight it you're the "useful idiot" for the people who would prefer that we all upload our passports.
- forces people to go to stores that primarily sell addictive substances
- prices out poor people, who can't afford adult websites, _or_
- even more money meant for bills / food is spent on addictions
- will have a stigma attached (why is that preacher in the liquor store? For porn or whisky?)
And I don't think these cards would have to be significantly expensive?
Or Instagram?
Nobody is being censored. We regulate who can buy alcohol or tobacco, gamble at casinos, or operate a motor vehicle without it turning into a slippery slope.
Politically, the free speech argument might have had a point if Silicon Valley’s most-visible “free speech” advocates hadn’t lined up behind an authoritarian who’s creating diplomatic tension (and thus domestic political capital) the world over.
The problem is that you are drawing the parallels in the first place. These are not the same things. This is precisely what a totalitarian regime espouses: information so dangerous it must be selectively distributed and access must be accounted for. Today it's pornography. Tomorrow LGBTQ materials are labeled as pornography. And soon thereafter you're putting in age verification to access non-state sponsored news, wondering "why is this required? should I be looking at this?"
I have no doubt that these are well-intentioned attempts by concerned citizens and civil servants to preserve some semblance of a decent society. The problem is that it's _always_ coopted. _Always._ Yet we can't seem to help ourselves but clamber towards more consolidation of power in the face of some new hysteria.
Your final point... _these supposed free speech advocates have supported an authoritarian, therefore they have no credibility_, _the only free speech advocates are in silicon valley_, _this is the only defense of free speech_. I have no idea what your point is.
That a few capitalists used free speech as a shield to make more money, we should throw the baby out with the bathwater?
I refuse.
Meanwhile actual studies on the topic show that social network actually creates addiction - who could have guessed when they were literally engineered for engagement - and have deleterious effects on health especially for teenagers.
This is not a free speech issue. This is a public health issue. This is the digital equivalent of the tobacco industry we are talking about, not a library.
How about when you turn 18 or whatever the government gives you a signed JWT that contains your DOB? Anyone who needs to verify your age can check that and simply validate the signature via a public key published by the government.
Simply grab a new JWT when you need it, to ensure privacy.
And sure, sprinkle in some laws that make it illegal to store or share JWTs for clearly fraudulent intents.
> the vast majority of kids don't easily have access to alcohol or cigarettes
This feels like it comes from an affluent perspective, where I grew up it was trivial to acquire these things and much worse, there will always be someone’s older brother etc who will do this for $20 because he’s got nothing to lose.
So you think we shouldn't card for cigarettes or alcohol either? I'm confused.
Also I'm pretty sure we all watched porn when we were under age and didn't get anything from it.
When I was young internet wasn't accessible for consumers yet but I built a pay TV decoder so I could watch their porn at night. It was easy enough. Only did black and white and no audio but it didn't really matter for that purpose :)
Still, I never got the idea that this was normal sex and I've always treated women with the utmost respect.
You're preventing public pressure being put on the legal sites to collect ID from their members to "save the children".
Your plan requires nuanced implementation details which the general public is ill equipped to understand let alone independently verify. In particular, it is already normalized (in America at least) that liquor and weed stores will ID even the elderly, and scan the barcode on the ID into their computer. Let's say you want to ban the computer part outright; the public won't understand why, because it's already normal to them. So maybe you permit scanning IDs but regulate the way businesses can store/use that data; the public can't see into the computer, they have no idea if the law is being followed or not. This leads to lax attitudes towards compliance and enforcement both, and furthermore, likely results in public cynicism aka low expectations, which will give way to complacency. This is why I don't think your plan will work well, it's doomed to degenerate into surveillance.
Then why are y'all so against Digital ID? We don't make you do that in Canada, it's just the clerk eyeballing your ID if you don't look old enough. I can't believe people are letting their ID get scanned and associated with vice purchases. Is it mandatory? Land of the free, eh?
Other than that, I’m under 40 and I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve been carded in the last 10 years on one hand. The fact my beard is mostly grey and I inherited male pattern baldness probably helps. Never had my driver’s license scanned, ever, for alcohol.
My wife on the other hand, who looks much younger than her age, gets carded all the time.
When I was young nobody really cared about age verification yet and these days I'm clearly not a teen anymore.
If there would be a store here that cards everyone regardless of age then I will boycott them. It's ridiculous.
I think there are some places where vendors have attempted to sell scanning systems as a way to identify fakes and banned patrons. It probably depends on the area how common it is.
My point in all of this is that we should not delude ourselves by theorizing about ways this could be implemented in a privacy preserving way, because even if that's technically possible, its unlikely for things to work out that way.
But in any case, my proposal would ban ID scanning altogether. There's no good reason to do it for any purchase.
The issue is and will always remain reselling the age verification tokens. The entire system is pretty pointless. Kids will just have some hoops to jump through, and they will be very motivated to do so. Criminals will be eager to aid them for some change too.
Either you forget age verification, or you can forget about privacy. Because identity theft is the only hoop big enough for most kids not to make the jump - and even that may not hold, typically identity theft is carried out for financial returns, the age verification requirement will change the calculus on that and will likely expand that particular black market to both kids and people valuing their privacy.
In my opinion it should be the parent's job to police their kid's access to an internet terminal. It's not even that hard. Mitigating the mistakes of parents at the expense of everyone's privacy is a poor trade.
People will continue to murder other people. That doesn't mean that criminalizing and punishing murder is pointless.
Now, whether the above scheme is prudent or workable, that's a separate question. But the counterargument to the scheme cannot be "It's all or nothing".
In this instance we are talking about a technology that is impossible to attribute by design, the only way attribution will happen is if the reseller makes a serious mistake. There will be resellers that don't make serious mistakes. And unlike murder, very few successful resellers are sufficient to serve everyone.
I forgot to mention in my original post. I'd also rate limit purchases. Maybe only allow purchasing one per visit.
> Kids will just have some hoops to jump through, and they will be very motivated to do so.
Maybe? Kids can just buy alcohol or cigs or drugs from criminals today. But most can't or don't. Some do, and we accept that as a society. And we punish the criminals who enable it.
This isn't like illegal drugs, where criminals have a massive market (adults with cash). A black market catering to only minors isn't very lucrative.
Moreover social media's network effects work in our favor. If most kids can't join, their friends are less motivated to get in.
I assume these scratch cards would be available everywhere Lotto scratchcards are - supermarkets, gas stations, convenience stores, tobacconists, newsagents - because it needs to be available and convenient for everyone to agree to it.
Since the ID is not recorded anywhere during purchase, some bored person can drive around and buy dozens of them on the same day for non-valid use cases.
But rate-limiting one per site means a valid use cases are blocked - adult kid wants their parents and grandparents to sign up to a new social network (Signal-style) and mom says she will get everyone a token while doing the shopping. She can't. Adult carer tries to buy a token for themselves and the person they care for in one visit. They can't. Small business employer wants employees to use a new WhatsApp style chat app and buy tokens for their employees. They can't.
None of the design stops mom-who-doesn't-care from buying a token and giving it to whiny-kid-who-wont-shut-up for their "FortnighTik thingy", or kid from asking grandma for a "scratch off token" for Christmas, or whatever.
> None of the design stops mom-who-doesn't-care from buying a token and giving it to whiny-kid-who-wont-shut-up for their "FortnighTik thingy", or kid from asking grandma for a "scratch off token" for Christmas, or whatever.
And nothing stops parents from giving their kids beer and cigarettes today, just to shut them up. But they mostly don't.
The point of my proposal is: do age verification as stringently (or loosely) and with as much privacy preservation as we currently do for alcohol and tobacco. The goal being to forestall more intrusive measures, which are really meant to expand the surveillance powers of states and corporations but are dressed up as "age verification to protect children". This proposal, or something like it, will satisfy the median voter that children are being protected without compromising anyone's privacy or anonymity.
That sounds fantastic, were just one step away from making social media entirely controlled by one single party
Perfect to push anyone you don't like into irrelevancy, politicians will love this
Journalists too, finally they can be rid of these pesky YouTubers that show how politically captured they're! Just need to get someone with admin permission in that company and you're golden
Why? Multiple companies could compete in the market of age verification tokens.
Right now we have actual partisans buying actual social media companies (Twitter, TikTok) to control them. That's a much bigger threat vector.
Why do we want this?
The entire proposal sounds designed to tank popularity for keeping kids off Instagram.
To prevent a monopoly driving up prices. And to keep the government out of the business.
What I like here is that you've turned a digital problem into a physical one where we already have solutions and intuition for how to enforce rules.
For example in Quebec, liquor stores are managed by the government, called "Société des alcools du Québec (SAQ)" or legal cannabis is managed by "Société québécoise du cannabis (SQDC)".
I don't see why other restrictions can't follow the same pattern?
Which is a huge disaster for expensive things (like your power bill), but is much less of one for a token that takes 50 cents of human labour and 0.5 cents of computing to produce.
So it would be
1. Site let's you pick your "age provider"
2. You log to you bank/govt site
3. They only get age as response.
Even easier with CC, shops could just send payment request with minimal age, if it doesn't pass, no sell
They also know who you are. This rules them out of a privacy-forward age verification system.
Why are we pretending Facebook and X don’t?
Start with liability. The age gates will erect themselves.
1. You can go to the mayor's house to get the token. No need to associate tobacco/alcohol to it.
2. It's free.
3. It's culturally enforced to exchange tokens with other people. This way users themselves help make sure it's truly impossible to trace their activity.
4. It's illegal to publish your or someone else's token. It's like a paper ID, with a QR code.
5. Can be reused. Expires after 5 years .
This way if you want 5 pornhub accounts you don't have to buy 5 stamps. You are also extra sure that the tokens cannot be linked to you because you can exchange it with anyone.
Trying to start a new social network in your world either has “every new signup must go to a store and spend money” or every new social network becomes tied to “sign in with Google”.
Your plan locks us into the current social networking forever?
I've already had my bank AND my mobile provider demanding an updated scan of my ID. Which is completely BS, after all I'm still the same person. I didn't suddenly become someone else. It's ridiculous they demand it.
But these cards sound like a better solution than using government ID yes.
> 7. A separate token is required for each website/each account.
I propose instead:
A single code valid for 10 packets sent to a single IP address, or 30 seconds, whichever expires first.
I think the whole idea of age verification on the internet is dystopian and should be tossed in the garbage.
You may think so. I have sympathy for that viewpoint. But the idea isn't going away. Public opinion is going the opposite direction. So what now?
As an adult I just couldn't be bothered buying this again year over year, let alone even once. I'm dropping the site instead of going to the store to buy this. Guess I'd just go fully offline.
Correct.
Umm...good? You'll have better mental health.
This is trivially solved with national IDs and strict liability.
Some people pushing for it are sincere. I believe keeping children away from social media or adult content online is good. But I also believe most of the existing proposals to do it dangerously erode adults' privacy. And that's the real end goal for many politicians.
Implementing a fully anonymous, pretty-good-but-not-perfect age verification system can cut the legs out from all the demands to upload ID to "protect the children". I've proposed a relatively simple one that doesn't rely on zero knowledge proofs or something else the general public can't understand.,
But leaders are supposed to set a good example.
Totally agree that the internet should remain anonymous though.
I'll just circumvent with a vpn which gives me more privacy not less.
Also I can't imagine the whole world actually wanting this shit. When I see the reactions here it's a pretty contested topic.
An eID system links your real life identity to any use of the eID online. Anyone who thinks there's a math or technology that fixes this misses the fact that it's the trust in the humans (companies, institutions, governments) who operate these systems is misplaced. Math and technology are implemented by people so there are many opportunities to abuse these systems. And once in place I guarantee, without any shadow of doubt that sooner or later, fast or slow, it will be expanded to any online action.
I will take anonymity and the small minority of kids who will find a loophole to access some adult-only stuff over the inevitable overreach and abuse against the large majority of people whose every online move will be traced and logged.
Triceratops Age Verification services, provided a state-sanctioned monopoly on issuing Porn Licenses. Awful, really.
Gift cards are "elaborate infrastructure"? C'mon be serious please.
If you haven't seen it in person, it is now incredibly common for children as young as 1 or 2 to be handed an iPad and driven down an algorithmic tunnel of AI generated content with multiple videos overlaid on top. I've seen multiple examples of children scrolling rapidly through videos of Disney characters getting their heads chopped off to Five Nights at Freddy's music while laughing hysterically. They do this for hours. Every day. It's truly horrifying.
Parents are just as poorly equipped at dealing with this as the children are, the difference being that at least their brains have already fully developed so that there is no lasting permanent damage.
There are cases of UK police turning up to homes for anti-zionist comments.
We're already there.
Among people who identify as Christian in France, the ones who could be described as radical or fundamentalist are a very small minority.
Leave people to their fantasies of digital control and let them learn lessons the hard way. This is not a technical issue anyway.
Your idea is garbage.
Give me a reason why my idea is "garbage" that hasn't already been covered in the comments. I'll summarize the current comments and my responses:
1. "Age verification is censorship and evil"/"This is the parents' job, not the state's" - That's a valid point of view, and I understand where it's coming from. But IMO it's increasingly a losing one.
2. "It's not perfect/it can be circumvented by ..." - All of the same circumventions also apply to tobacco and alcohol. Everyone accepts that and the world goes on. We prosecute people who break those laws. Whatever the harms of social media and adult content, they aren't worse than literal poisons that cause car accidents and cancer.
3. "It doesn't preserve privacy because they record ID where I live" - Fix the law. Ban scanning ID where you live. I can't believe you ever accepted that for tobacco or alcohol but now's your chance.
4. "Why do I have to pay? This should be provided by the government" - Then we're back to ZKPs (not comprehensible to laypeople) and paranoia that governments are tracking you anyway. But hey, I'm not a policy or crypto expert, so I'll defer to people who are. Maybe this aspect can be improved.
5. "This requires a lot of new legislation" - Yes. Governments are already at work writing legislation for age verification. Do you want to be proactive to make it privacy forward or sit passively while they decide for us?
In case it wasn't clear: multiple companies can issue tokens. Sites can choose the issuers they accept.
This setting is stored in a secure enclave and survives factory resets.
I will note that these two systems are not mutually exclusive. There are plenty of ways to "think of the children" that don't trample on everybody's freedom.
EDIT: or to rephrase, this proposal is opt-in (device attests the user is a minor) not mandatory (device is required to attest the user is an adult)
Like seriously, do you really think that if currently minors can buy tobacco and alcohol using unlawful means, then your TittyTokens will somehow be magically immune to the same problem because you really really wish they would?
You can't patch this without creating some form of a central database of who exactly buys how many TittyTokens.
No I fully admit some minors will still get access to FaceTok. We accept this failure for alcohol and tobacco. We don't have internet connected beer cans phoning home when you open them, asking to scan your face.
But at least where I live, most kids aren't falling over drunk or puffing away at school bus stops. So if the system is good enough for selling actual poisons, it's good enough to limit most minors' access to online vices.
Moreover social media has network effects. If most kids aren't on it, the rest will likely not bother either.
Are you a politician?
I also have no issue with viable alternatives (read: have a chance of being passed as law) that preserve privacy. This is just my idea, take it or leave it. I couldn't care less.
Plus, this would spawn massive online black markets for the codes, fueled by crypto/gift cards/other shady means of money transmission.
Why? They're adults. Let them believe what they want.
"Children" gets the Right to march behind you unquestioningly. "Misinformation/Nazis" does the same for the Left. This is now a perfect recipe for a shit sandwich.
It's better than the fatalism in your comment IMO.
There’s so much that falls out of the social media definition. And regardless, kids are not stupid… VPNs, proxies, etc are easy to circumvent with.
Who cares if many can get around it, if the majority can't or won't, then it kills the network effects.
This legislation is very much giving more power to the government over what its citizens cannot do. The real impetus is control by the powers that be. The ideal citizen for an authoritarian would be fully controllable via digital means. A digital id that is networked with services is a wet dream for authoritarians.
What does this have to do with limiting Zuck's net worth? Because less kids will see less ads? How much will this reduce his net worth? If we took licenses from kids and had them wait until 18, would you be claiming this is to prevent Musk from gaining more wealth?
then you're going to see president Hegseth using those laws to ban video games and pornography.
HackerNews has an algorithm but it's not personalized—i.e. everyone sees the same thing.
Now explain that nuance to an 80 yr old law maker who hates the damn email.
When it is, and when your local government becomes sufficiently captured by the user surveillance industrial complex, you will need real world verification here.
Social media typically implies a website where users are sharing self-created content. If a website with comments counts a social media, than all web2.0 is social media and there's practically no distinction between the web and social media.
In the case of HN, most people are here for the comments section and frequently don't even read the article, so it's primarily a social media site with a news aggregator feature.
Pretty much everything? Not the same intent, not the same usage, not the same business model, not the same users, &c.
This is hard to define in laws so e.g. the EU chooses to force concrete measures from the social media pages.
It’s like asking why you prevent kids from buying alcohol but don’t stop them from buying fruit juice.
There is a lot of writing on what makes “social media” particularly more harmful, and its addictive nature etc, but again, we don’t need to necessarily get into the cause and knowing it’s harmful should be sufficient.
To give an idea of how such laws might approach it, the recent New York Law requiring social media sites to display mental health warnings was written to cover sites with addictive feeds. Here's how it defined those:
> "Addictive feed" shall mean a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users of a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, either concurrently or sequentially, are recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information associated with the user or the user's device, unless any of the following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another:
> (a) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on information that is not persistently associated with the user or user's device, and does not concern the user's previous interactions with media generated or shared by other users;
> (b) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on user-selected privacy or accessibility settings, or technical information concerning the user's device;
> (c) the user expressly and unambiguously requested the specific media, media by the author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (d) the user expressly and unambiguously requested that specific media, media by a specified author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to pursuant to paragraph (c) of this subdivision, be blocked, prioritized or deprioritized for display, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (e) the media are direct and private communications;
> (f) the media are recommended, selected, or prioritized only in response to a specific search inquiry by the user;
(> g) the media recommended, selected, or prioritized for display is exclusively next in a pre-existing sequence from the same author, creator, poster, or source; or
> (h) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is necessary to comply with the provisions of this article and any regulations promulgated pursuant to this article.
Too much of a coordinated efforts between western countries, thus it cannot fail. The decisions have been made and your voice pretty much doesn't matter.
Source for these bans being unpopular?
The timing of this coincides with countries in particular have seen a major rise in anti-migration sentiments which have become very fashionable and popular among young men in particular as polls show a global trend of men under 30s are shifting towards right wing with women towards leftwing.
Suddenly, they decide NOW is the time to stop despite the fact that they've allowed young people to be exposed to all sorts of "dangerous content" and algorithms for decades, in the late 90s and early 2000s as teenagers we had uncensored access to the internet, warez, anarchy, shock as they have circumventions widely shared among each other today.
In short, these countries are so concerned about a civil unrest in particular between religious groups that are perceived to have "overstayed their welcome" that they are outright trying to shutdown online discourse both legitimate and exaggerated.
Europe, in particular UK, are on the brink of a major civil war as per intelligence reports and the ban for the young won't be the last but that the net would be cast even wider. It's a last ditched effort bandaid solution to keep the dam from bursting. With the backdrop of Keir Starmer's threats to extradite Americans and jail people for posting grievances against the demographic crisis, you can see where Europe and other advanced economies even in places like Korea mirror the trends, conflicts and draconian laws to buy time for the inevitable.
If we want to keep this debate going there has to be an understanding of the political context and direction that can only be realized through inference and intuition. They will never openly announce true motives as that would hinder the objective. The comments I am seeing are awfully similar to the confusion and fierce debate I see around wrestling control of TikTok, which have largely been blamed on China, but the concern around uncensored videos of atrocities committed in the middle east reaching hundreds of millions of young people that has shifted steadfast opinions of a certain country which for decades were positive, now show significant departure among age brackets within the same political camp which shocked a lot of old people from that same side.
Perception is everything and the question "asking for a source on if these bans popular" completely misses the mark and irrelevant, rather the more interesting question is,
"will these bans that limit freedom of information and speech escalate and proliferate in the near future and whether France, Australia, Korea is just the start?"
" will the countries reviewing ban like new zealand, greece, canada invite more countries to join the trend?"
" why are these bans being accelerated in countries that have seen a large wave of migrations that are causing major frictions?"
I worked on the TikTok bill. Middle East stuff never came up.
It might have had a role in New York and Michigan. But most of the debate, drafting and lobbying was in respect of national security, trade policy and a touch of Taiwan policy.
When you have a pet issue you tend to see everything through it. My pet war was Ukraine. For a time I had to fight the impulse to classify everything as a derivative of it.
The parent said that your voice does not matter, nothing about the volume of such voices
Plus, we saw that in Australia that the lobby behind the ban was in fact an ad agency that makes ads for gambling apps.
Here is France, the ban is probably just a way to avoid legislation against companies selling crap that isn't for kids like vape pens and sports gambling apps.
If you think social media is harmful, wouldn't it be good to regulate social media? What does regulating French (or Australian, or wherever) citizens have to do with it?
There doesn’t have to be one.
> If you think social media is harmful, wouldn't it be good to regulate social media?
Literally what a ban for under-15-year-olds is.
Literally what a ban for under-15-year-olds is.
If you're going to argue, please do so in good faith by taking my whole post into context. Thank you.
Furthermore, France is in the EU. They expect to deploy their implementation of the EU Digital Identity Wallet by the end of 2026.
That allows users do age verification using protocol between the user's smart phone and the site with the age restriction. (Later they are expected to add support for smart cards and security tokens like YubiKey so a smart phone won't be required).
That system works by storing signed identity credentials tied to a hardware security device you provide, and using a zero-knowledge proof based protocol between your device and the site to prove to the site that your identity credentials show an acceptable age without providing any other information to the site.
The EU has been working on this for several years, and it is currently undergoing large scale field trials.
Sure. Australia opted for private compliance. Adults who choose to use social media are subject to more surveillance (because that’s how the social media companies chose to comply). In exchange, not only does that level of surveillance not apply to children, but the default state of surveillance they were under from social media companies (and being normalized towards) is gone.
It's usual to say that MPs are old people that don't understand current technologies, but in law preparation committees they appear to be well aware; in particular, they mentioned a "double-anonymity" system where the site requesting your age wouldn't know your name, and the entity serving age requests wouldn't know which site it is for. They are also aware that people walk-around age verification checks with e.g. fake ID cards, possibly AI generated.
I'm not sure if it is actually doable reliabily, and I'm not sure either that the MPs that will have to vote the law will know the topic as well as the MPs participating in these committees.
I would personally consider other options like a one-button admin config for computers/smartphones/tablets that restricts access according to age (6-14, 15-18) and requiring online service providers to announce their "rating" in HTTP headers. Hackers will certainly object that young hackers could bypass this, but like copy-protection, the mission can be considered complete when the vast majority of people are prevented from doing what they should not do.
Alternatively one could consider the creation of a top-level domain with a "code of content" (which could include things like "chat control") enforced by controlling entity. Then again, an OS-level account config button could restrict all Internet accesses to this domain.
Perhaps an national agency could simply grant a "child safe" label to operating systems that comply to this.
This type of solutions would I think also be useful in schools (e.g. school-provided devices), although they are also talking about severely limiting screen-time at school.
For the french speakers, see:
[1] https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.17950525_6942684...
[2] https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.17952051_6942761...
The ban doesn’t need to catch every single case, it just needs to add enough friction to stop the most frequent and destroy network effects.
Irresponsible parents are irresponsible parents, and they can do much worse than letting their children wander on the Net alone. IFAIK no law at least here forbids parents from giving alcohol or tobacco to their children, even though it is forbidden to sell those products to them. Toxic social media are mostly the same.
Although the topic is a ban, I think the idea is less about forbidding and punishing, and more about helping - albeit in questionably manner according to some - helping parents with "regulating" the access of their children to the Net. Of course, the easy answer is to recommend giving them dumb phones instead of smartphones, but really a smartphone is too useful to be ignored around high-school age.
It protects privacy while being as robust as any other existing age restriction method.
They are implicitly the same thing.
You can't exclude children without first verifying _everyone_ and from there excluding people who match age < approved. This is basic logic.
If you were a cynical person you could imagine this is actually politicians wanting to bring in an ID law and using "think of the children" as the social justification for it.
If you're a conspiracy theorist you'd wonder why Apple and Google have now added the ability to upload and link your passport and other real id into their respective app wallets. How long before your phones browser is digitally signing all your social media posts with your ID...
> How long before your phones browser is digitally signing all your social media posts with your ID...
Under 10 years I'd say at this rate
ID verification was not required for adults in Australia. Age was inferred based on activity. In fact, blanket verification was disallowed by the legislation.
It's like people here are arguing about a law they haven't even read.
> As stated in the law passed late last year, platforms also cannot rely solely on using government-issued ID for age verification, even though the government-backed technology study found this to be the most effective screening method.
> Instead, the guidelines will direct platforms to take a "layered" approach to assessing age with multiple methods and to "minimise friction" for their users — such as by using AI-driven models that assess age with facial scans or by tracking user behaviour.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-15/social-media-ban-fina...
Sounds like a good theory, apart from the minor flaw that France already has ID cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_card_(France)
Many of their citizens chose American social media because they prefer American values. This offended the nationalists so they are simply going to ban American sites and try to make their own inferior ones.
Traditional media (Murdoch) and traditional gambling lobbied the hardest for these laws (of course these are anything but traditional). This is a billion dollar gimme to newscorp, but they will probably still fail to pick up the younger audience because they can't compete.
In America we have freedom of religion and freedom of association, we used to have the freedom to put whatever we please in our own bodies and minds.
Yet computer education in France has been severely lacking for so long. From middle school to even universities (except the courses computer focused obviously) people aren't taught correctly. Teachers themselves are lost to computers and lectures are bad.
The goal is obviously to have tech illiterate people knowing just enough to use computers for the job but not worrying about the digital autoristarism currently being deployed.
If anything, without social media access, kids are more likely to play/hack around.
Either way, you should meet some rednecks.
Unless they want to remove all of technology from 10pm to 8am, this bill is going to be ridiculous. Teenager and kid will always find better things to do than sleep.
Besides, like many point out, this is just a way to deanonymize the web for everyone.
Why is the state always meddling with the citizens lives and personal responsibilities, and why do we let them? Do we really appreciate so much this nanny state?
There are also easier options of no personal Internet access, and unrestricted access, but I suppose these are not very good for this stage of development.
As citizens we like to delegate aspects of our lives to the government; for example, I'm responsible for commuting to work on time, but we have delegated the maintenance of roads or public transport to the government, and this is something that could also be done by the private sector (private roads, private transportation), and ends up as a constant negotiation between citizen and government. Some polities like Germany and I think Sweden have subsidized education for children in exchange for mandatory public schooling by an institution either owned by the state or extremely highly regulated by the state.
Agree with you. But you'd be surprised at the number of people who think that the state ought to do things for them, including raising their kids.
And the state is currently pushing social media onto kids and parents, should it maybe stop doing that, at least?
Yes. That's what nature does. You are of course free to help them with your personal resources.
> And the state is currently pushing social media onto kids and parents, should it maybe stop doing that, at least?
When did the state have the right to 'push' social media to start with? Do you need a law for everything that can potentially go wrong? How about a generic 'do no harm' law? (I must note that social media can be avoided by most people at this point but I digress.)
Yes. Unless you and other people that think like you go there and help them with your own time and your own personal resources.
My children shouldn’t have their parents time and money stolen by the state to give to children who’s parents don’t care enough to properly provide for them.
Those people haven't bothered looking into the details. Some jurisdictions require age checks in a way that deanonymize people, and some require they be done in a way that do not deanonymize people.
The EU is strongly pushing for the later in the systems EU countries are adopting or considering.
How? I can't hover over the shoulders of my kids 24/7 - there's no world in which that's practical.
Maybe tech companies should start offering parents tools to make it easier? The same tools that people here might already use to keep that bullshit away from their kids.
You can control them at home and you can control their mobile phones. You can also expect the school to control their computers there. The remaining time will be a very short amount of interactions and I think we can healthily live with that.
[1] At best with a "trust us we won't tattle" "privacy" architecture.
Kids at 13 and 14 are pretty much on a different level. Back in the day we used to self host games, networks, kick pedos away (specially girls which made good laughs on them and dealing with them as dirty scum) and so on.
What _older_ kids need it's both accountability and tools to kick idiots away between their own group.
Block the sites at the country level - good luck with that - or stfu.
This is never going to work, and in 20 years we'll all be laughing at this omg get the genie back in the bottle legislation.
I wish my country (USA) would adapt similar laws.
Now you have right-wing extremists running the sites and deciding what you should view, just look at Twitter/X and Musk.
The problem isn't that people are consuming (social) media, it's that everything is owned by so few people. We shouldn't be punished for this by having to submit to even more surveillance.
I'm glad though, it lets me know who to avoid at all costs.
(We will still need the internet for communication, but hopefully far less for entertainment etc).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y893SFA0iOk
I am at the point where I'm watching out for messaging apps breaking actual end-to-end encryption (sending data based on local scans definitely applies there, even if the data is just sending a red flag once in a blue moon). And you can bet the second that happens, I'm out. One last message to all my contacts to tell them, and that's it.
And if things get real bad, like, actual private communications become illegal, I know ways to get around that: https://elligator.org/