European nations gear up to ban social media for children | Hacker News Reader

European nations gear up to ban social media for children

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32 pointsbelter27 comments

Good! It is a bit too late, the damage is done, but it's better sooner than later! It took me a lot of effort to keep my daughter away from it but it worked! Social media is like opium or cocaine; better not start using it because there's no way out!

Not good at all because that means you have to hand over your id to almost all platform. Youtube is a social media as much as any other platform with user generated content.

Their approach is the worst possible thing. They could enforce Google/Apple to support installation of owner controlled fibe grained parental controls that allows parents to whitelist sites and apps.

I would prefer to handle this on the devices but that's never gonna happen :(

> Not good at all because that means you have to hand over your id to almost all platform.

That't the idea. And I bet Google, Microsoft and others have nothing to do with it.

As usual, this has nothing to do with protecting children. It is all about forcing people to identify themselves on social media.

Free speech in Europe is under serious attack.

I'm old enough to remember when the big names in social media sites decided to copy Facebook's "Real names" policy, which they added themselves for better targeted ads.

If this is an attack on free speech, the war was lost 15 years ago, even in the USA. Of course, given what's going on in the US right now, one may well respond "yes, the US did lose sometime around then".

For now though, I'd be more worried about all the verifiers leaking PII due to vibe coding and competent attackers.

America is run by tech bro billionaires.

Europe doesn't really have a tech industry and the CCP has the balls to jail them.

> America is run by tech bro billionaires.

IMO, that would be an improvement if it were so.

Rather, it is being exploited by tech bro billionaires, squeezing the population's ability to generate disposable income in the same way Malthusianism expects populations to always grow to the point of squeezing the environment's ability to supply food. That's much worse than "running" the country.

So how would you protect children?

Make child possession of a phone illegal, jail the parents who do not comply.

That's the responsibility of their parents. Your reply exemplifies exactly why this kind of thing is presented this way, anyone questioning it is immediately asked why "they don't want to protect children", it's the perfect kafkatrap.

I’m going to guess you are not a parent…? I think the problem is a bit more nuance than you are making out…

i don’t have kids (yet) but this sounds like a social problem, not a technology problem. You literally need to have parents in a community work together to COLLECTIVELY decide what’s best for their children.

A simple technical “ban” is dumb because it’s trivial to bypass, and doesn’t actually solve the problem. Kids are not stupid, they will happily find workarounds.

For example schools could facilitate this. Don’t allow smartphones on school property until children are in high school - only dumb phones allowed. Schools can educate parents early and heavily encourage a no social media policy at home. The only reason kids want to use social media because all the other kids are using it.

I'd say network filtering, like already done by schools, would be preferable. For privacy concerns there'd be no need for handing over your ID to see websites, and for ownership/treacherous computing concerns the home router and phone plan are typically owned by a parent so there's no need for devices working against their owner. Mostly feels like just a matter of sorting out UX/defaults and pushing towards standardization.

Not impossible to bypass, but nor is the current approach. Likely more effective in that it only requires compliance from a handful of entities operating commercially in your country rather than thousands of websites globally.

Free speech is not a concept that exist in Europe, at least not in the USA form...I dont say it as critique just as a factual statement.

Free speech as understood in the US, like rooted in the First Amendment protection against government restriction, does not have a direct legal equivalent in Europe. Most countries balance expression against other rights like dignity, public order, etc...

A lot of it is also wrangling Big Tech, which is increasingly an existential geopolitical risk.

The silver lining could be that people just spend more time in the real world, discussing important things. Which is definitely good for peoples autonomy and freedom. That's why I'm not too bothered by AI slop for instance, making the internet a worse, less rewarding/novel place in general.

I'm convinced the real reason for this is nations are growing terrified of the extreme effectiveness of political bot farms. Nations have been asleep at the wheel letting hostile countries spew trash into their citizens heads 24/7, even epstein was in on it with him potentially being the impetus for 4chans /pol/ board that was a major driver for Trump. Everyone is panicking trying to put a stop to it before every western government gets overthrown by a extremist one with foreign backing.

Europe is also being under hybrid warfare attack for years from Russia and their bot farms and now officially from USA as well - See recent US doctrine where they want to shift EU more to the right.

This identification is just a result.

Free speech abused by Russia, USA and China to target EU.

True

EDIT: Speaking as a European.

Here is another idea for how to solve this:

Why not produce a second kind of phone that is for kids. Maybe have it linked to their parents accounts on a hardware level. The kidphone is physically restricted somehow to only installing certain apps, so that parents can ensure they are safe.

This approach would put the power back into hands of parents, keep the kids safe, and also prevent all this intrusive age verification stuff from happening.

Also it is a lot easier to police. You could physically look at the phone the child is using to make sure it is a kidphone. If not, then they are committing a crime, similar to a child smoking a cigarette.

> Why not produce a second kind of phone that is for kids

It exists, it is called an iPhone or an Android phone.

> This approach would put the power back into hands of parents

They have it ... they don't want it. They don't want to say "no", they want to be friends not parents to their children.

Most parents are completely powerless when faced with pressure from their kids. Or even worse, their kids’ friends.

The same companies that sell addictive stuff to kids give them an aid to abstinence. They are kidding us all.

Better have multiple levels of defense. National firewall, school ban, parent supervision, phone lockdown. Only then the exposure will be mediated over all possible channels (stolen accounts, fake adult IDs, friends' devices).

This is not about children, never has been. This is about curbing Russian and US influence campaigns on social medias in Europe, especially towards elderly people who are easily manipulated.

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