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Comment by colinmarc | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised by the complete lack of dissent or even nuance in the discussion here. I'm much more ambivalent on this: the historical record for prohibition is not good, but instagram and the like are uniquely and disastrously harmful and the companies pushing them on children are powerful in a way that has no real historical precedent. In the balance, anything the reduces the power those companies have over our lives (and our politics) has to be at least considered. In other words, I don't think this is necessarily the right measure - but I'm desperate.

Didn't regulating cigarettes kind of work?

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> Didn't regulating cigarettes kind of work?

I am not sure what time or country you are talking about but when I grew up (Germany in the 90s) we officially could only buy cigarettes from age 16 (or 18?) and 50% of my friends smoked. So that did absolutely nothing.

Later (I think, man it's been a while) the vending machines needed a driver's license or id to verify the age and guess what, as long as you had access to a single person over the age of 18 you could still get cigarettes.

Stepping away from the cigarette topic... I think mixing the two topics does not make sense.

First one is: Is there stuff on the internet that kids should not be exposed to without supervision? I don't have a strong opinion, I don't have kids. Probably not, but I am not even interested in discussing this

Second one is: Will some stupid laws like the mentioned ones help in any way? Maybe a little, probably not really and only for kids who don't find a workaround. Will they have catastrophic side effects and thus are not worth implementing for minimal gain? 100% yes.

But why not force age verification / content restriction on Facebook / Instagram / alikes instead? There aren't really that many big players, isn't it?

Also, if what the OS does, is requiring to pick some number from 0 - 100 and date without doing any verification, everyone can lie. It has other flaws like not considering that many people can share accounts, some embedded devices with UI can no longer receive updates, etc. Honestly, if I thought for 30 minutes, I could list dozens of such problems. I doubt these laws can work efficiently enough.

For now this might sound like the least of evils, but are we sure that these idiot politicians won't come up with something even more insane after seeing the inefficiency of this?

How would you impose it on them? Facebook's only way to tell your age is for you to upload an ID document and don't we want to avoid that? But when a parent buys a device for their child, they can just enable the setting that says "this device is for a child" and then Facebook can see that setting, with no further identity information transmitted. That's better privacy, not worse.

This might be plausible to an extend (probably for much younger children). If the child can manage to install an OS (which is not that difficult nowadays), or is some kind of power user, then it will not work well. Also the laws are about offline software, how it will be implemented for websites (most of the harmful social media is actually there)? There are no answers (i guess the web must implement some standard, such as http specific header). There are so many edge cases that I don't even want to talk about.

optionality already exists and works very well

you can install very tight parental controls on many devices

but this is not about optionality, this is about forcing the mainstream into verification and certification schemes that most people won't be realistically able to avoid, it's about control and compulsion of the mainstream

Sure, age restrictions played a part. But the larger reasons are the increased awareness of direct health effects, banning it in public spaces, and taxing the hell out of tobacco. I’d bet if they restricted app usage in specific locations, that alone would break the habit for some people. And imagine if you charged them each time they logged on.

>instagram and the like are uniquely and disastrously harmful

-to both adults and children. What kind of worked for cigarettes was the huge tax so why not create a "mental health tax" based on the number of users x some addictiveness score and let meta either fix instagram, pay their users a therapy or pass the cost to them.

Instead this "protecting children" by giving them "degraded" experience will only motivate them to bypass the age verification and destroy the statistical evidence of the harm those platforms cause.

Flawed analogy. Cigarettes are physical goods, and regulating them does not spread easily to other things.

Everything online is virtual, and implementing surveillance in one area, almost always spreads, infecting everything else, until we've built 1984.

Most of us are old enough for 'you wouldn't download a car' nonsense...

But as adults that are starting to have kids, this "hard divide" between physical and virtual starts to break down. What I mean is that we can't always use the excuse that we can't apply some reasonable law just because an item isn't "physical".

this is why the vector of attack of "think of the kids" is almost always the first when it comes to try to lock down the internet in some way

it's "protect the kids" or "counter-terrorism" and nowadays also "harmful content" because as the internet is now fully mainstream, softer and softer heads start to prevail

Online discourse is sadly doomed. And if not yet, then tomorrow surely.

https://arxiv.org/html/2506.06299v4

> instagram and the like are uniquely and disastrously harmful

Could we perhaps regulate them to require that they be made less harmful for everyone?

> anything the reduces the power those companies have over our lives (and our politics)

If we're concerned about politics, I presume we're talking about the impact on adults, but these age-based restrictions are not intended to change anything for adults.

Did regulating cigarettes kind of work? I ask just because I don't actually know. I always assumed that the regulations were a reflection of the growing society wide distaste of cigarettes and not a cause of it. If regulations were enough to change peoples attitudes towards something then why did alcohol prohibition fail so hard?

I mean, cigarette usage in the US is down massively since the US banned cigarette advertising to kids and actually started enforcing the ban on cigarette sales to kids.

Meanwhile, after cigarette companies spent some time thinking about how to solve the problem of falling sales, "vape" (which did not have the same regulations) sales surged first in kids, who have continued to use those products into adulthood (after they became addicted).

So, I would say "yes" regulating cigarettes not only worked, but was a massive public health success.

It's down massively because they're taxed to death making a smoking habit very expensive.

To my surprise, this graph [0] shows that even when taking into account vaping, it seems that smoking has truly gone down in the US.

[0]: https://ecigone.com/featured/vaping-statistics/

It's not the job of the operating system to protect children. Social media is bad even for adults, to my point of view why they don't address the source of the problem, banning what Instagram, TikTok, etc. is doing that is bad even for adults, and don't make laws that restricts even more what a person can do with their personal computer (if this law comes into effect it's like saying it would be illegal to run Linux or whatever OS that doesn't implement this bullshit)?

Well, surely because the government is full of investors in Meta and uses Meta for their propaganda, and possibly because the government wants more data to put on their databases that is used by ICE and other agencies.

I'm surprised people still fall for the "think of the children!" excuse.

> Didn't regulating cigarettes kind of work?

That’s commerce. The regulatory target in the case is speech. We don’t do that here.

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