Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Also, the object - social networks - is global. Yes, all kinds of societies have had alcohol, but alcoholic beverages don't suddenly become 20% more potent or harmful everywhere at once. With centralized platforms, that can happen.
Palantir and similar corporations are on tour and hand in hand with our bought off representatives are they killing the open internet.
Don’t get me wrong, I dislike Facebook and such as much as the rest of the HN crowd, but this not the answer.
You are saying exactly what OP is saying but just rephrasing it another way.
The more a movement crosses borders, the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country and the more likely it is to be based on the needs of the transnational billionaire class.
Drinking age is not the only example, driving age is another good example and also the old TV rating system. What was considered taboo in America was often at the same time considered to be fine in places like Europe, or vice versa. But we never had a coordinated international push for censorship when it came to TV/movies like we are seeing with social media.
I can remember how much people used to deride mass surveillance and censorship in places like Russia and China and now here we are very quickly catching up to them in every way.
its blindly obvious that this is an agenda that SOMEONE is pushing EVERYWHERE, one can then speculate who that might be, or for what purpose
This is simply not true. The US puts pressure on countries to harmonize their regulations and laws to ours, unless it is to the US's advantage that other countries have different laws than ours. The world didn't suddenly get draconian drug laws through "political movements," it got them through diplomatic and funding pressures. The US often used those laws as excuses for military and intelligence interventions, or to build political organizations in those countries in the guise of antidrug organizations.
All countries do things like this, but the US is rich and dangerous enough to do it hardest. The US has decided that it wants everybody tracked at all times, especially online, and when it explains the advantages of this to the elites of other countries, they also like the idea.
Smaller European countries have also made it a cottage industry to fanatically push US agendas in places like NATO and the EU, because it gives their little homelands outsized influence (and bags of cash) to operate on behalf of the bully. For some reason, everybody in Europe has to care what e.g. Estonia thinks about something, although Estonia is just saying what the US wants Europe to be doing, and the US is financing Estonian candidates for European positions (and maybe even having Trump lobby against them to give them even more credibility.)
This attack on any sort of privacy online is not coming from the churches. There is no lobby group that it pushing it that doesn't get the majority of its funds from any number of governments, which is just government lobbying itself. The way democracy is supposed to work is that the people support something, and they then vote for candidates that will give it to them - but there is no visible constituency lobbying for this other than casual liberal cynics who aren't organized in any way.
As a comparison, in 2015 there was like 65-70% popular support for single-payer health care in the US. There were dozens of organized groups supporting it. It even crossed 50% among Republicans for at least a year. Not a hint of anything happened.
edit: Also Europe, like Japan, is one of those places that had a really emotionally tough time outlawing pedophilia and child pornography. They certainly don't care this much about the sexual aspect of child safety, at least. What Europe has never been behind on is the censorship of political speech. That is what can excite people.
It varies by country, but I would guess most political leaders didn't grow up in the era of social media, so there isn't some ingrained belief that kids actually need this stuff. And with growing globalization, it makes perfect sense that many new laws would be similar because they are both motivated by the same factors and can be used as examples for each other.
I'm afraid we will never get to that point anymore but I do think there was a point in society where social media was a positive addition.
This is probably the reason why there is no unified age for drinking, because everyone came at it at different times from different place and have differing rationale including social, religious, cultural etc.
Social media is new and there is no cultural/religious rule for/against it. So 16 is the starting point someone decided (was it Australia or NZ?), and others are following since it's a good starting point. As time progresses, maybe it'll move up or down and different countries might take a different stand.
Yummy yummy targeted data now directly to identified children with the ability to hide the smoking gun from the parents entirely. We’ll wait till you leave them home alone. Don’t worry.
I always had it in my control go prevent my child using social media, but I couldn't control every other child in the school using it as the way to stay in touch. This is the kind of collective action that is beneficial for kids.
edited for tone
Look, I hate (Zuckerberg's) social media just as much as the next person and I would be happy if it were nuked from this planet, but firstly, a lot of this sudden age verification shit to "protect the children" is sus AF, leading me to assume their ulterior motives are surveillance and doxxing of anonymous online free speech, and secondly, I don't think we can put the toothpaste back in the bottle anymore similar how prohibition didn't stop alcohol consumption, it just moved underground.
As long as kids have smartphones, they'll find a way to use social media, or even make their own social media to organize parties, send nudes or flaunt their parents' wealth and bully the poor and ugly kids, the same way how they start drinking beer at 13 even though the legal age for that is 18.
Social media amplifies the worst of human nature, but you won't be able to change human nature. Maybe governments should regulate the amount and type of data collection social media companies can have from their users, instead of regulating their users.
Some have lower ages with parental consent, this isn't reported in all cases. Some also talk about banning the downloading of apps, again this isn't reported in all cases. Not that I'm going to read 27 national jurisdictions in varying languages to confirm the point.
Also, lol wtf at "and websites and operating systems all need North Korean ID verification to prove you're over 16". Is "North Korean" the new "Communist"?
Make no mistake social media as it was with scraping so hard kids bled, was bad for children. Facebook ignored the lessons learned from the 90s with TMI (too much information) and in fact some people who used a lot of yahoo mailing groups from that time might still recall the big sweep that occurred. It came to pass that some people still ignored Facebook rules and used pseudonyms - you know just in case and in Australia this became a big big thing back a few years ago with a different govt running the show here with a prominent pro Trump (sycophantic) leader ruling the roost. maube hours after Trump got roasted by an anonymous comment, the crew in Australia were pushing to require ID to access the internet ... a person was appointed to address anonymous accounts ... and in the end after the govt changed she was also tasked to oversee social media.
One might think that age limiting a site it would force ID checks, however other smarter people know that most social media sites, especially the ones there were scraping hard and targeting young teens dieting and other BS young teens seem to susceptible to, have the capacity to guess fairly accurately if the account holder is a youngster. Right now these companies are saying nah these algorithms are dumb and the govt can't do a thing ... right up to the point when the present govt decides to start fining for every account that should not be there and or just offering bounties to the average Joe Jill public [and not businesses or those tooled up with A.I. help] There's a phase in time going now at the moment -- none of the big tools out there have figured out how bureaucracy works in Australia.
I don't know... looking at the map[0] it looks like there's a fair consensus on 18yo.
Also, maybe the reason for the "whole world"[1] is doing this at the same time as to do with the globalized nature of internet and its effects?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age
[1] put me on the skeptical bucket that this map will ever look like the drinking age map
Humans have been living with alcohol for literal millenia so I reckon it's much harder to have some globally uniform response to it.
Social media is a clear and present danger right now, and I support the suppression of it. I would go one step further and ban algorithmic feeds outright. They do so much damage!
I am not happy with the way this is being implemented though.
Why go to the silly conspiracy theory place? Up until then I was in violent agreement, but things don't need to be a conspiracy to be bad. The rules are well-intentioned but poorly thought through, which is devastatingly common for government action in digital spaces; witness the fucking cookie popups (no illuminati involved in that one, just stupidity).
People and lawmakers are just not thinking through the privacy implications for the people who are exempt from these limitations, and the persistent nature of digital paper trails.
Being on this social media (YC) people aware it's all about implementation and we should at least demanding better solutions. If you want to regulate/limit access of kids to social media just make that you have to be 16 years old to buy simcard - in many places in EU you already have to show ID to seller.
Allow parent to buy simcard to their under 16 year old children if thats what they want to and allow parents to decide at their home wifi if kid should have access to social media or not.
As for finding a technical solution, jury is still out but I am unconvinced that it is possible to have a solution that a) prevents children from using an online service, b) allows adults to use the service, and c) does not identify the specific adult who is using the service. You proposed solution is no exception.
Who exactly has a vested interest in starting a worldwide conspiracy to ban social media for kids?
FWIW as an adult in my 30s, social media has caused me far greater harm than even binge drinking. I can't even imagine growing up as a teenager under the social media microscope
Second, age verification systems have a lot to benefit from a government contract.
Third, social media and ad companies would for sure prefer a blanket ban on children rather then a more careful legislation which e.g. ban targeted advertising, or further regulates social media from harmful patterns.
Social media companies have shown that they do not give a shit about the mental health of their users, quite the opposite seems to be true. Yes, parents are responsible for teaching their children about the reality of modern social media, but they can only do so within the limits of their abilities and understanding. It's similar to smoking. Yes parents are responsible for teaching their children about the dangers of smoking and encourage them not to, but no one thinks removing the age restriction from tobacco is a sane idea.
One one side you have big companies paying huge amounts of money to super smart people to get teens hooked on their products.
On the other side you have parents who on average dont understand how social media algorithm works or in some (too many cases) they cannot follow the logic to a second order effect.
Even here we have comments saying something like "be smarter and teach your kid to be smarter than big social media companies" not understanding that addiction cannot always be defended by improved IQ. Geniuses can have addictions too.
Who gets to decide what is 'predatory' and why do those people have the right to make decisions in place of able-minded adults?
Murder isn't illegal because we want to protect people from the results of their actions, it's illegal because we want to protect people from the actions of others. (Or, failing to do that, punish the aggressors in response) Surely you see the difference?
Basically, the argument is that people's liberty should only be restricted up to the point of defending the liberty and rights of others. If an action hurts no one other than its actor, the state has no right to restrict them. People should be free to live in line with their wishes and conscience up to the point of not violating the rights of others.
With regard to seatbelt laws, I would ask the same question, as I do think that the seatbelt laws are also paternalism and morally wrong.
Anything less is exploitation
That’s why these laws happen to begin with. It starts as “Think of the children”, and ends with the death of the anonymized internet.
Governments crave that, and scared, hapless citizens who refuse to learn how to raise a child want Daddy Gubament to do it for them, and so push these laws into existence.
https://www.mwl-law.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/PARENTAL-...
an excerpt from above:
"Almost every state has some sort of parental responsibility law that holds parents or legal guardians responsible for property damage, personal injury, theft, shoplifting, and/or vandalism resulting from intentional or willful acts of their un-emancipated children."
"Parental responsibility laws are one vehicle by which parents are held accountable for at least a minimal amount of damage caused by their children as a result of intentional acts or vandalism"
but also yes, child welfare laws and such are also pretty fitting examples. i dont think the person asking for an example was really asking in good faith, anyhow.
its an example of holding the parent responsible when the child breaks a law.
if accessing social media below 16 becomes illegal, this is a literal perfect example of holding parents accountable for their kids illegal activity. you can't possibly get more relevant.
there is no reason to shift parental responsibility onto tech companies. we have existing laws that can be used as templates for social media bans.
It's also interesting how Windows 11 with it's hard dependency on TPM hardware just happens to be in place at the right time. And how a certain former Microsoft employee just happened to start working on a similar solution for Linux before this all started https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
Even if you think it is about kids, then take responsibility into your own hands, be a parent and prevent your kids from using it. Or you just want to tell other parents to raise their kids the way you want? Then tell them that, don't hide behind fascist police and justice system to force online ID for adults.
Common but bad argument. You've misunderstood what the age verification control is for. It's to hold online services accountable for illegally providing services to minors. A parent being negligent doesn't mean Facebook should not be held responsible for breaking the law.
Further, facebook users could chose to use platforms that don't exploit their users. By allowing facebook to benefit from the network effect, they are responsible for kids wanting to be on the platform. They give facebook power, and then facebook uses that power to exploit children. Yet facebook's adult users don't even see the need to defend themselves. To take responsibility.
Some of these laws affect mastodon, so these laws are not a regulation of facebook. What exploitive features of mastodon deserve such a ban? Are children addicted to mastodon's default chronological feed? It seems like it would benefit facebook to establish a regulatory moat that smaller non-ad-driven competitors don't have the resources to comply with. It certainty doesn't seem to have affected their stock.
Also there is reasonable suspicion that meta lobbied for similar laws: https://tboteproject.com/git/hekate/attestation-findings
So much for holding facebook accountable.
Oh, also: https://xkcd.com/743/
> breaking the law
what law?
I don't know what makes this more "coordinated" (so there is some supra-national organization coordinating this between nations? starting to sound like the Utopia show) than other legislation that trends very quickly
Anyway, as a parent I 100% support it. I really don't care whether people think it's because of the kids or not.
It's partly because of the kids.
It's also because social media is part of the USA's soft power projection, and many of us now consider this to be a threat.
It's also because social media has a long history of manipulation for their own gain, against the users' interests, dark patterns, tracking, they fail to back down from and even file lawsuits to continue tracking when tracking itself required (under GDPR etc.) permission that e.g. Meta did not have: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/28/report-facebook-building-anti...
For "about the kids", consider: given kids have no direct purchasing power, what adverts can they possibly respond to in a way that actually provides gain for the buyer of the advertising slot? They cannot. Therefore, by fighting for the right to keep kids on their sites (despite the huge extra effort that needs to exist to keep them safe on their sites given the inherent ambient hostility that comes with giving everyone direct access to, in Facebook's case, a few billion other humans), at least one of two things must be true: (a) they think they can get kids hooked, and be able to convert them to profitability as adults, and/or (b) they are scamming the people who buy advertising slots, knowing full well the kids who see the ads cannot possibly buy anything. If a third option exists, I cannot guess it.
But what you said - "It's also because social media is part of the USA's soft power projection, and many of us now consider this to be a threat." - strikes me as the most plausible driver behind it, given how chummy Trump and the techbros have become.
I agree with your other observations about SM. But they've all been true from many years. That's why this sudden urge by culturally diverse societies to act now feels suspicious, to me at least.
You shouldn't. I mean, they talk to each other continuously. Them coordinating things is normal. The EU nations will be doing even more coordination, because the EU is a body for the coordination of those nations.
> That's why this sudden urge by culturally diverse societies to act now feels suspicious, to me at least.
We're not all that diverse, really. Ironically, social media may have brought us all together against social media. And it's not really all that sudden, this has been building for many years now.
Similar things due to Trump trying to bully everyone, but specifically NATO, the EU, and the Americas (and all the international stuff DOGE cut) will have a lot more stuff like this, some of which will be coordinated, some of which will be everyone spontaneously making similar decisions. That too will take years… well, unless Trump actually picks a kinetic fight with a NATO country, then political years pass in a few weeks.
Why the silly conspiracy theory? Can't something just be stupid and bad but well-intentioned? You really think lawmakers are involved in some secret cabal that wants to track everyone's activities online? If anything, jurisdictions have shown that they are very interested in preventing the tracking of people's activity online, they just don't know how to do it!
See TOLA in Australia, the UK trying to backdoor iCloud, Lawful Access to Encrypted Data act.
Surveillance is often sold with safety as the primary narrative.
...yes? Not so secret though. The internet gave everyone the power to take matters in their own hands and read up on different sources from different countries and people and to talk to more people. They don't want to lose power and want their citizens to be uninformed and not coordinate efforts to critizice them and hold them accountable. Not only online but also offline because more and more surveillance cameras get installed, police gets more powers, checks citizens without suspicion.
Did you forget the Snowden leaks?
Prohibition doesn’t work. Educating consumers and holding companies accountable works. It historically takes time though for that pressure to accumulate to the point of having political will.
We also need teen social media education - like we have about alcohol and drugs. Where we’re frank about the real research. Don’t moralize. Talk about the realities of the situation.
Excessive drinking was curtailed by 70% during the alcohol prohibition era, and acute drinking was a problem (it was more concentrated).
There is zero doubt how much healthier at least some people would have been.
The price paid was limiting freedom for many, and some increase in crime.
Allowing children to smoke and drink from age 12 would be a social disaster, it's not even an argument - obviously - the 'prohibition' works - and in that case, there's nary any negative externality.
Yes, there is 'lost economic potential' from not having kids buy smokes, there is a degree of authoritarianism, but those are trade-offs we are happy to make.
The question is the degree of restrictions on basic freedom, and the direct / indirect externalizations - aka 'underground pubs', 'black market', 'lost benefits' etc.
For social media - kids 'sneaking' onto regular social media is hardly an enormous hazard.
There are also 'critical mass' problems - for example, its' very hard to get people away from a system if they will 'feel left out'.
The negative externalizations of a teen social media ban are likely most related to the positive aspects of social media aka community, connection etc outside of school.
Twitch, for example, I think is fine for kids.
There is probably a happy medium that's a bit nicer, for example, banning phones in schools is something that everyone seems to be ok with - that sets a good baseline.
We may want other social media places for 12-18 to have parental opt-ins and to be a bit more assertive around harassment and bullying - which is a very serious thing, and very pernicious as well. It's really hard to monitor.
Creating 'PG spaces' is probably what most parents want.
The worst negative externalization from all of this is probably state-implemented age verification, identity issues, and the leaks, failures and excessive authoritarianism that can come about aka 'slippery slope', which is a serious argument. Even then - there are smart ways to do this which avoid many of those risks.
The negative externality is the huge amount of young adults damaging their bodies with excessive alcohol consumption in college because they never learned to drink healthily. The US with its late legal age for alcohol has a far bigger problem with youth alcohol abuse than European countries where youth are introduced to alcohol earlier.
Given that alcohol is carcinogenic, there is no such thing as "drinking healthily".
That point aside, alcoholism rates in the Eastern EU are much higher than the US. And Russia/Belarus leads the world. I don't think younger drinking age correlates very well with reduced rates of alcoholism.
The legal age for alcohol is 18 in France.
This idea of 'US binging' doesn't really hold that much water, though one could very well argue that 21 is just 'too old' - the fact is, these are as much cultural issues as anything else.
Same with Japan, they are 'polite drunk', it's not even quite the same thing.
Take the argument and apply it to smoking or cocaine, fentanyl and you see that it doesn't really work out.
It really depends.
US could have lower drinking age, possibly 'permitted with parents at 16' - but - a much more responsible culture overall as well. It's hard.
I don't disagree we need to look at algorithmic recommendations as a major issue, but these social media bans are not that. The fact they are all being brought about globally at the same time suggests some ulterior motives.
Fundamentally, the idea you're going to hide your kid from social media until some arbitrary age, require the entire populace to register identification when visiting any website, and then open the floodgates on these kids at 16 is absolutely moronic. Two years of brain development doesn't suddenly make them learn how to be responsible with it.
As much as Europe wants to abdicate their parenting responsibilities to the state, at some point you have to draw the line and own up to some level of personal responsibility for raising your children.
You can't hide your kids from reality if you want to raise strong, independent and actualized children who will make good choices.
Which is why is also not a solution. Both are bad solutions because we drag our feet into creating safe products for everyone.
Also, you can have both: substance education and prohibition. Those factors need not be exclusive.
There are groups that would love to be in full control of visible information and parents rightly concerned about social media use by kids.
A police investigator trying to do his job is 100% sure he can solve crimes this way, to him, there is zero doubt about the benefit of being able to get info from social media, it's a moral concern.
The anti-terrorist squad - same. They see all sorts of threats, daily they are truly concerned, they're all waiting for horrible things to happen and in each case they 'knew they could have prevented it'.
Then you get corporate interests, who just want to 'sell gear to make money'
Maybe it even works really well ... because of 'checks and balances'.
But then, the 'checks and balances' start to fail, either from corruption, bad legislation, legal rulings etc.
Those forces all collide into the 'slippery slope'
Not "every parent knows this"; lots of parents fiercely oppose their kids being banned from access to decentralized information and communication sources. Would you prefer your kids get all their information from textbooks written by Glisaine Maxwell's father, all their news from sources owned by zionist-aligned billionaries?
Crucially, parents can trivially allow their kids to access whatever information they want.
Finally 'textbooks written by such and such' is delving a bit into conspiratorial inanity.
It's often buried because the people making money dislike it, so much so that they will lobby the government to impose wide bans. Especially if:
* The ban makes somebody else pay most of the costs of protecting "the children" against their design-choices or business-model.
* The ban gives them a blanket pass for almost any exploitative design against adults or other acceptable targets.
It absolutely does. Just look at smoking and alcohol.
> We also need teen social media education
Sure, that too. But to think that it's enough is very naive. Unlike alcohol and drugs, social media is being pushed on teens at every turn. If there was a drug dealer on every corner, and drugs were free and tasted great, the education on drugs wouldn't go that far, honestly.
IMHO the solution should involve defining what's natural social media and what is predatory social media. The natural one can be a system that connects real people with each other and operates discovery algorithms that have %100 open source and run on open data. When its real people interacting you can educate around it, you can have it with anonymous accounts too but you can develop protections against bad actors by actually looking into the thing to see what's happening. In real world that's how people interact and although damage from things like lying or gossip still exist we also have ways to navigate around it by teaching manners, ethics, etiquette, politeness, fairness etc.
Then there's the unnatural social media, that is most of the social media today. It is not a natural human interactions, it is managed human interactions for profit or influence. Information is hidden from the participants but it is not hidden from the host of the gathering and the host develops tools to create conflicts or control for its own benefit.
My personal experience is also that 17 year olds in countries where the legal drinking age is 16 drink more than 17 year olds where the drinking age is 18, but I don't have numbers on it.
When are we ever going to get beyond raising awareness/educating bad/arguably-bad things? All of these manufactured wants, needs—totally synthetic. The business model is to prey on people. But the answer is yet more things to lecture about?
By going beyond that I mean real alternatives. Like Christian abstinence organizations might not just have a say-no-to-alcohol stance, sit at home and be bored. No, they sometimes even have social gatherings and activities. They do the same thing for students. The stance towards alcohol-abstinent students is not simply, well you can choose not to drink but heh, most of your peers drink and most of the late-night activities revolve around that. They offer alternatives: alcohol-free activities.
What would I give to be able to opt out of the things that I find bad for myself? Like really, ban myself from say buying cigarettes with my credit card. But is that ever on the table? No. Just the discourse pit of freedom and unfreedom. Where freedom happens to coincide with Big Tech’s bottom line.
And education.
Adults are not better at handling them than kids.
For example, the previous German government was paying influencers for sponsoring heat pumps. All these "content creators" must be paid by someone - left, right, center, oil, nuclear, gas companies, it's like watching TV for its advertisements. Crazy what it has become.
So, that will most likely never change, although that's probably in the top 3 reasons why social media is unusable.
I have 3 kids, 2 use their phones like half an hour at a time, the other is completely hooked, hours and hours. If I don't intervene he doesn't dress in the morning, and continues until he really can't keep his eyes open anymore somewhere around 3am.
For him I use the parental control on my router. All his devices have time limited wifi, and he has no data in his phone plan. Since I've done this he goes outside more, and has developed other interests. Today he actually prepared lunch for us, a 14 year old boy!
My point is, I think it's better to help your kids use their phones moderately instead of completely blocking. I once heard from an alcoholic who always keeps beer in his fridge. Not to drink it, but to be sure you learn to deal with this shit, and wherever the beer is, you can manage not taking it if you don't want it.
I strongly believe humanity needs to find ways to slow down, but the prevailing culture is for everything to go faster and faster, which doesn't leave room for nuance and non-emotional reasoning.
I have to say that I don't believe in most people's ability to teach their children critical thinking, compassion, nuance, etc. Most people barely manage to feed their kids and not mess them up too badly on the emotional side.
Former alcoholic, I got similar advice early on. It was life changing.
Blocking social media is no different from existing laws for cigarettes, alcohol and various other substances. Nothing wrong with using them, but we do restrict self-serve access for developing minds.
Sure, kids will find a way. That said, like a glass of wine at dinner, parents are free to share their social media experiences with their kids; safely, supervised, limited.
I feel like the response of the tech community in the US overlooks the fact other countries don't have many options, nor power to actually make these companies change their ways.
I don't want to see age verification either, but I have limited sympathy for these companies given they've spent the best part of two decades ignoring every attempt at getting them to change and do something themselves.
We've been seeing age verification stuff roll out for a couple of years now and still none of the major companies have done anything to clean their act up (and some, like X, have got way worse) so it's not like they're really helping make a case against these policies.
These are uber-personalized feeds optimized to keep you scrolling to the next item (story / video / post) so companies can show more ads.
"Social media" is a textbook example of a euphemism. We should be calling this what it is: "addiction feeds".
And they are probably moving to a system where you need to link your device with a government issued cryptographic ID (i.e. passport) using zero knowledge proofs. With a system that ensures an identity can only be installed on one device at a time.
This means a parent would have to give up all social media accounts and chat apps on their own phone, in order to give their identity to their kids.
The parents don't actually need their adult, childless neighbors to show their IDs to protect their kids, but it seems we're going down that exact path.
Amusing Ourselves to Death and Superbloom both describe the same thing: methods of communiation become more efficient and education becomes more simplified, to the point of not being valued.
The nadir of which is Trump shitposting policy decisions on Twitter because he has no literacy, no intellect, and people like him because of that because he's just as uneducated as they are.
Back in the early days of the US intellect was king, it's how the US became what it was as far as I know it.
This social media ban looks very reminiscent and I think it is all about creating a surveillance state, controlling the population to only see images and video in a centrally approved way.
In the US, Meta in particular is pushing for OS-level age verification [1]. What a surprise. The company without an OS wants OS makers to do it and, more importantly, to be liable for it.
Many purists believe such a move is bad for freedom of expression. I'm sympathetic to this argument to a degree but I think we've shown that it's been a failure. More to the point, whether or not you agree with age verification, it's coming regardless so the only issue really is what form it takes.
This will go beyond social media too. I'm thinking specifically of gambling. I'm including crypto gambling as well as sports betting and prediction markets. In the real world we require you to go to a casino to gamble and you will have your age checked at the door. We've just been removing the barriers to gambling addiction and extending it to minors. My prediction is that this will change.
For anyone who thinks teens will just get around this with VPNs and other workarounds, of course some will. Not everyone will. And blocking such measures will get better over time. Also, network effects will come into play. What will it do if half your friends aren't on social media? What about 75%? 90%?
Also, this is going to cut into advertising to minors. That I think is a win. Companies won't be able to target minors in affected markets. Meta (etc) will be legally responsible for making sure they can't. That's good.
Just like tobacco bans to minors aren'100% effective, neither does this.
[1]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...
The comparison to ID checks when buying cigarettes is missing the point. Human ID checks have few downsides and are relatively high cost to fool.
In the real world, you show your ID to a human and they look at the date of birth and photo. They don't copy or photograph it, they surely won't read let alone remember anything else from your ID, it would be very obvious, costly and dangerous for a criminal to install a hidden camera and secretly record everyone and their IDs. We also don't attach the ID physically to your body and assign an individual police offier to follow you around 24/7 so you don't try to tamper with it somehow.
On the Internet, a securely (safe from bypasses) implemented age verification system makes sure your device is owned and used only by you, that you can't lend it to somebody, that you can't modify or inspect it... It also enables some level of reidentification for catching and prosecuting you if enable access to a minor despite this.
These are two wildly different situations.
But as I roll that thought over in my head I wonder, was the internet ever really safe? Maybe there weren't companies messing with your psychology for profit, but perhaps it was all an espionage platform the whole time. The internet, http and html in general, has a smell of being designed from the ground up as a spy tool. It's as if we've all been filling out Obsidian documents on ourselves and voluntarily linking them, and somewhere there is a central node that can see the whole brain.
Maybe it wasn't hostile in the same way where it turns your brain into mush, but it seems like it was never safe.
I also find this all questionable. A 18 years old is not penalised? So why is that a difference? I should say that I don't use "social" media (unless commenting on a forum is called "social" now), but I find the attempt to explain this ... very poor. I could not try to reason about this. I could not claim it is meant to "protect" anyone at all. Is this pushed by over-eager parents, who don't understand what to do on a technical level? I really hate censorship in general. So, even while I think unsocial media such as Facebook should be gone, I hate any such restrictions. Then again I also don't trust any legislator who pushes for this - I am certain this is to force age-sniffing onto everyone. And then extend this slowly. Step by step. Salami by Salami. Until anonymity is gone.
Educating kids about the potential harm, and also making parents take some more responsibility seem like a more positive approach to me.
I don't claim there is much consistency in governments actions (ie see weed demonization for past 60 years and misery it brought when cigarettes and alcohol were just fine), but absolutely, 0 zilch sympathy for the cancer that 'social media' are these days. They can go bankrupt overnight and no amount of former facebook employees screaming about needing to feed their families or similar popular excuses would affect the big smile on my face.
Also, does these bans extend to text-only social media such as HN?
There is no social media official definition from my understanding.
The bad ones are the ones with the uncontrolled (by the user) algorithmic feed
If you're European, you should be happy about the law but very angry about how it is going to be implemented. but better than anger, please spread the word on the need to establish a standard protocol for age establishment that does not involve bigtech in any way, shape, or form.
> hackernews: "Good. It's about time government took action. The only cure for these abusive capitalist companies is government regulation."
> government: passes law requiring age verification at the OS level
> hackernews: "Oh no! How could this happen? We have to fight this you guys. For sure if it weren't for big tech lobbyists we wouldn't have to worry about draconian laws like this."
If you really want to go after abusive capitalists, then go straight to the source. Regulate the things that are making this ban look like a good idea.
We've already had reports of the UK's Online Safety Act resulting in a convenient uptick in defamation lawsuits. Certainly not because the government can now easily track who posted a tweet that ruffled the feathers of someone important. So yeah, at the cynical end, I question the motivation of these laws and at the charitable end, I worry about the direction these laws are moving and their impact.
The data we have on bans on underage drinking and smoking show that they work. Some kids will still smoke and drink, but the number is reduced, drunk driving accidents go down, and eventually fewer adults abuse alcohol and smoke cigarettes.
The myth about age limits making it forbidden and attracting more kids to do it is just that it’s a myth. Spend some time looking at the studies. They almost universally show that age limits on drinking and smoking are harm reducing.
Second, the peer pressure to drink/smoke has never been as strong as the network effect of social media. Almost all 15-year-olds are on some form of social media, I don't think you can reasonably expect they will suddenly stop wanting to socialise outside school. Their entire identities are built around their online presence; that was never the case with smoking or drinking, at least not on this scale.
I'm sure it will have some effect, but kids are clever, and they have lots of time, they will find ways to bypass these fairly weak bans. Imo, the only way to do this is to provide an alternative along with the ban, like what the Russians are doing with Max as a replacement for Telegram/WhatsApp, though that's not entirely successful either.
Then there’s the contrast between calls for regulating social media for kids followed by the outrage when people realize that 1) products they use are considered social media (Discord, Reddit, Hacker News) and 2) you can’t keep kids out without age checking everyone who uses the product.
sure, just like some kids sneak cigarettes; but the vast majority don't. I disagree that it's symbolic.
The govt will be able to deny computer access for anyone it doesn’t like, for as long as they don’t like them.
There will then be many ‘underground’ internets, which will all be banned, where the underclass lives. It is also where real innovation will live.
It’s a brand new day and our dystopia has new frontiers available for the brave.
Only with very old technology, its possible force ID validation from silicon to server or even to unlock the cpu cores so if it ever comes to what you suggest that will also happen.
Also ban giving toddlers iPads with YouTube.
Outside of this group (which happens to be my peer group) I see a noticeable drop in media literacy and ability to detect bullshit, but that may just be a blind spot for me since I’m part of the aforementioned Millenial group.
How do you invest in ad companies that ran ad campaigns for smoking companies.
I am equally as worried about slop content being pushed to the social media feeds of gullible people of the older gen-x and boomer generations as I am of young people. The general problem of human attention span being monetized as a commodity for social manipulation, political manipulation and just generally selling things (the advertising industry in general) is getting worse, not better.
Lonely children aren’t the fault of the government, they’re the fault of parents who let them scroll TikTok in their rooms all day, because actually parenting would be difficult or inconvenient.
A simple solution would be:
- measure the harmful effects of it if there are any, and make it public
- tell parents to take away the kids phones while they are at home
press x to doubt
i would need to see some data for that. no way the law had the effect of causing kids to sign up to social media who otherwise, before the law, didnt.
at worst, i could maybe see the law having a 0% effectiveness (i.e. the same number of kids using social media before/after the law). but i think even that is a big stretch.
The Australian government should fix that.
Delaying from 13 (COPPA) to 16 won't change a thing.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Home Alone -- I thought if I had one of those talkboys, I could get some changes made. But in an age where every teen has a recording device in their pocket, I continue to see the kinds of stories that made my blood boil... because when it came time to get the authorities involved they dragged their feet the entire time, if they would even file a report at all, and that inaction is paired with a "zero tolerance" policy on any kind of self defense that sends kids out into the world reluctant to give folks the rightful punch they deserve if they act out (and are entitled to give in most stand your ground states.)
Extending adolescence doesn't solve the root problems here, and conversely, more adults should reread a copy of "1984" and be a little more fearful they're held to the rules and norms they instill on the youth.
There’s been a decent amount of studies to suggest it can actually, since you’ll be pushing the uptake of social media outside the peak age range where things like bullying, body image issues, grooming, etc. start to happen and, therefore, limiting the harm.
It’s also a time when a lot of life-habits start to get set down since 12-13 is when kids start having to assume more responsibility for themselves and begin learning how they manage their time, build their study habits, etc. Not being habituated into doomscrolling during that period seems like it can only be healthy. It’s not as if they’d be cut off from the internet entirely, they’d still have Wikipedia and all the boring, non-attention sapping parts of the web. And they’d still be able to direct-message or group-chat with their friends. They’re just spared the algorithmic feeds.
Then cite them
The more these laws are enforced, the more we hand over this information to any unscrupulous website operator, app developer, or advertiser. Are we about to hand Elon Musk [0] your kids' PII? How about Zuck, who (friendly reminder) sold your 2nd-factor phone number to advertisers [1]? How about all of the leaks from these ID services [2]? Or how about these services doing far more than Age Verification [3][4]?
Given the terrible track record of data breaches in tech, this means all this information leaks into even worse hands with little recourse for people and no punishment for companies.
From a security and privacy perspective it's in kids' own self-interest and self-protection for them to undermine all of these laws.
0: "I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for." https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02706...
1: https://www.securityweek.com/facebook-admits-phone-numbers-m...
2: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/hack-age-verification-...
3: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/persona-age-verificatio...
4: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/02/age-verificat...
One way is the California approach which requires that device operating systems offer parental controls that parents can set up when creating accounts for their children that will provide an age bracket to apps when the children are using the device. The California laws requires that apps that need to restrict use by children to ask for that age bracket.
Note that the California approach does not actually do any age verification. The parental controls accept whatever the parent says is the the child's age bracket.
Another way is to put actual ID documents on the device, cryptographically tied to the device, and to implement a protocol by which software on the device can prove to a remote site that the device contains such ID documents and that those document show an age that is in the age range that is allowed to use the site but without disclosing to the site any another information from the documents. Google, Apple, and the EU are all using and/or working on this type of approach.
The social media and children protection bullshit serves only to introduce a mandatory identification for accessing the internet.
And we all laughed at the "conspiracy theorists" who were constantly warning us.
It's a bummer, because I think a platform that follows Facebook's original intent has just as much value in today's world, if not more.
What astroturfing? This is the most popular moral panic of our times. Yours is the default normie position...basically what is leading to all this poorly thought out legislation being emotionally shouted by the mob into existence.
Just so you're aware, all the worst laws are the ones created when the populace has been emotionally riled up into a mob over something, and where people refuse to rationally look the reality of the issue. See also: nuclear power, 9/11, the 90s satanic panic, violent video games in the 2000s, jazz music in the 1920s, the subliminal lyrics trials of the 80s, etc. etc.
Most of the actual academic literature suggests this is a giant moral panic.
The funniest part of all of it is the "social media mental health crisis" that millennials think they're saving their children from doesn't even exist anymore. All the dominant platforms of today are not based on the social graph. Nobody is getting bullied on their timeline or seeing all the parties they weren't invited to anymore. The most popular platform right now is essentially short form MTV.
If we're banning that and any website with "social" functions, anything with comments or upvotes like this website needs to be included.
You're cheering on identity gating the entire internet and a giant erosion of privacy. But again, your mind is made up already and as you've said, no rational thought can change it. So enjoy the new world of unintended consequences you're creating. When this moral panic is over, you may look back with a few regrets like everyone has over the Patriot Act.
I think in recent years the infinite scroll of auto-generated content that bamboozles your brain is considered way worse than seeing the parties you weren't invited to. I think you're the one that's being "millenial" and thinking this is related to cyberbulling or whatever.
> And if its just any website with "social" functions, this one should be included!
This is actually a reasonable take and is being discussed elsewhere -- the "social" tag doesn't really apply any more. "Algorithmic brain-engaging drip feed" would be more apt.
Also, there's no ad servicing going on/major profit element for ycombinator here. Doesn't mean there isn't self-promotion/astro-turfing, and it clearly benefits ycombinator's reputation to have this, but it isn't an ad platform with social aspects like social media.
HN doesn't have this.
Moderation is another question. On HN again I don't really get the sense that there is a lot of censorship. On Reddit, on the other hand, the behavior of moderators and admins is legitimately frightening once you start paying attention.
Overall I would shut it all down forever if I could, but if I had a limited budget I would prioritize Meta's platforms and similar algorithmic infinite-scroll slop feeds. I think all they do is addict people to scrolling and epistemically poison them without giving any real value back.
I'm worried that while these bans have good intentions, they might be targeting the wrong things. The direction is right, and I'm glad action is being taken, though.
HN is usually not covered.
For example New York's law covers sites with an "addictive feed", and defines "addictive feed" this way:
> "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.
There are problems with social media, yes. However, these problems exist for children and adults. A reasonable way to tackle this issue would be to make social media safer for everyone, not just to exclude kids. These problems are not solved with an age check, and if the age check requires handing over PII, that introduces additional problems. We have to wonder what the motivation here is, and if we aren't heading towards giving up freedom for perceived security.
These companies need to do what's best for shareholders, which means do the most addicting and damaging thing. Besides that, we have almost 20 years of evidence of attempting to fix it.
Where it's gotten us is that social media is a tool for the president to broadcast threats of genocide to millions of people. Banning or restricting that kind of platform is not the same as the PATRIOT act.
You may or may not be acting as an apologist for the sleaziest, worst industry on earth here, but you certainly sound like it, even if it is unintentional. As this is hacker news, P(makes money working for sleazy, terrible companies) is high so you'll have to accept this obvious interpretation.
Look, I actually kind of agree with you, but social media _already has all the PII_ to an extent unparalleled in history. Come on. "We have to wonder what the motivation here is"?
Then there's all the spoofing and the "age gate" software that inevitably needs to be done to do this.
This kind of behavior is incredibly reactionary and rooted (if not directly in the financial interests of entrenched legacy media) in the belief that your local culture somehow superior to online culture.
The difference is you imagine kids going outside and playing chasey while Murdoch imagines getting them on scratchers and tv and running stories about increased kidnapping. If your position wasn't astroturfed it would come with bans on legacy media consumption too.
[1] https://adelaide.edu.au/about/news/2026/social-media--sweet-...
In general, if someone comes along and says that someone else's rights should be shrunk, I think they should give up those same rights first.
You can just look at the US congress for how this isn't done as they frequently carve out exceptions for themselves and staffers.
Many of us grew up in the offline-is-default time, but our cohort will age out. Then we’ll only be left with people who grew up with these technologies shaping their lives and perspectives, who have little sense for the alternative.
The window of time is closing for us in this cohort to use our understanding of what life was like without these technologies to advocate for a healthier environment for kids.
First it was indoor smoking, now it will be for everyone born after 2008 in the UK.
As they say, I would rather be uninformed than misinformed.
A most obvious difference besides that is HN isn’t a nonstop feed of short form video appealing to the insecurities of teenagers, using notifications and social feedback loops and the suggestion that you’d be missing out on what your friends are up to if you left.
HN doesn’t even let you follow people and barely lets you know who they are. It’s centered on ideas, not people. HN and social media are almost nothing alike.
This sums up my understanding of the current situation (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/understand-the-im...)
That isn't anywhere near definitive.
Further it seems to me, this will just allow the tech companies to assume there are no kids, and remove the protections currently available.
Yes there is an issue of quantity, but it seems that we should be focussing on social norms for what is acceptable parenting in the 21st century. I'm 42, probably the lower age range for having a teenage kid, I have a couple of kids myself, and I'm not 100% sure on what the correct approach to take is, as I suspect the situation is for most other parents as the situation is so different to what we experienced at that age.
This is 100% an education issue and they don't understand how harmful that can be to their child's brain.
Governments are focusing on banning things because some reason but real solution is education and support imo.
Similar issue with school shottings. Government wants to ban guns or put controls on schools but they don't invest enough on mental health, it is almost if they are incapable of understanding that a healthy person wouldn't choose to do this.
The social media ussue is similar imo, parents don't understand how harmful it is to the brain. It is harmful for adults and it is even worse for children
It is not. Most parents I know have seen what it does to their kids, but have zero childcare. I have a white-collar remote job and can police my kids. If I was dual-parent working class, I don't think I'd be able to pull it off. I'm glad these laws are getting on the books, so at least the peer pressure of a classroom can get to a good majority of kids.
The kid with the iPad at the restaurant is just saliency bias ("I see it everywhere!"). This is not that different from blaming parents for sending their kids to school hungry or for their kids getting abducted or some such.
Social media is a vortex with a very strong societal pull.
Where do you live where this is normal?
I’m a parent who spends a lot of time going on walks and to parks with my kids most days of the week.
It’s rare for me to see kids with tablets or phones in their hands. When I do it’s kind of surprising.
Which social media companies are acknowledging there is a problem and providing data to inform parents?
Was at my daughter volleyball game a few years back. Sitting in the gym. In walks mom with a baby girl and a boy that looked around 10ish. They sit down. Mom gives the baby the ipad to futz around with. The son? Takes out his book and starts to quietly read.
It was an interesting contrast to say the least.
This is also something I've heard from my son about more kids are getting off of social media, or giving it up for other means to communicate. My son just graduated HS and said all of his peers have left Facebook, Snapchat, X and several others. He said his generation now sees social media as something for Boomers and my (Gen X) generation. He said people think you're lame if you're still on social media. Everything is now back to Discord servers and other platforms like 4Chan. Anonymous, under the radar stuff, out of the prying eyes of adults.
There was a study shared on Hacker News a few months ago that looked hard to find correlations between different measures and social media use or gaming in kids. It didn’t find any evidence of negative correlations between social media or gaming with different negative effects.
The response here was largely skepticism and disbelief. This topic has jumped out of the realm of evidence and into the range of moral panic. Facts don’t matter any more. The conclusion is assumed.
It’s really sad to see how quickly Hacker News, of all places, is jumping head first into welcoming age restrictions and bans with barely a passing thought to what it means. We already saw with Discord that tech communities really don’t like what age restrictions look like in practice, but whenever you make the topic about “social media” everyone assumes it will only be Facebook or Instagram, never their Reddits or Discords that have to go through identity checks for age verification.
I'd avoid such generalizations. It's a divisive topic, but from what I've seen here, there's always lots of criticism (regarding implementation at the minimum) in the comments and it definitely isn't clear that most would be jumping head first into anything.
> I'm not 100% sure
I don't think anybody was 100% sure social media would be the best thing since sliced bread when they subjected humanity to the experiment, so I don't think you have a whole ton of reason to freak out here. Either they're wrong and can keep moving forward, or they're right and can backtrack. The children will survive and so will you. L
The next generation of plucky startups now have more hoops to jump through, creating a moat around the incumbents.
And even if it is harmful, why is a complete ban the best approach? The internet is a tool. Should you not let kids cook because they might harm themselves? Or do you teach them, so that they can avoid hurting themselves in the future? While avoiding the downside of bringing up kids who can't cook?
Some one in the UK civil service was quoted in the Times, they stated that the online safety act is not about protecting children. It is about controlling the discourse.
It's not even so much the social media itself, but it's the companies controlling social media, who push every lever to try to increase engagement. It's not unlike the cigarette companies back in the day, trying to make them as addictive as possible, with ads everywhere, getting it movies so it's cool, etc.
If we had no-ads, paid subscription social media accounts, no endless scrolling, where social media companies revenue was not tied to time spent in the app, where you only see from people you follow, that would be a whole different conversation.
Meta/ByteDance/Snap/YouTube have f*ed it up, and this is why we can't have nice things.
This is the 21st century.