As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15 (or some other number, higher or lower I don't care). I'm pretty sure they're worse than cigarettes for the future of humanity.
Agreed. Teachers are seeing the massive benefits from banning phones entirely during school hours. I think once we get data from bans for certain things like social media for kids, we'll all want to get on the wave.
Basic human decency says your workplace environment should be chill enough to let you take breaks as you, yourself, dictate. If you're underperforming because of it, you're fired. Enforcing a rule as you claim strips the employee of what little respect they have left. To be honest, your suggestion is sickening to me.
Highly skilled jobs can absolutely be 'perform or be fired', because you're paying for a person's ability to do a specialized thing, and there's usually only so much specialized work to be done.
But there are also a lot of 'we need bodies at a low cost' jobs.
And those latter jobs run on work_output : labor_cost, which can always be maximized by making fewer workers do more.
(Consequently, why the real goal for people studying / graduating in the modern economy should be to find a way to get into the former jobs...)
Yes, and this dichotomy has been analyzed by political and economic theorists for centuries and everyone except autocrats and slave owners has agreed that the conditions surrounding the "work_output : labor_cost" jobs you describe are a huge miscarriage of justice and ought to be discarded with the past. Whether that is predicted to occur via bloody revolution or capitalist accelerationism is a matter of your particular economic and philosophical taste. But every ethical human being says we shouldn't treat people like that.
I'm curious, do supermarket cashiers where you live stand or sit? Why/why not?
The job of pick items up from a belt, finding the barcode, moving that across the scanner until there's a beep, and then putting it on the "out" belt, really does not require the employee to be standing for it.
So why then, are they standing? Because merely sitting looks lazy and unprofessional? Sure if it's a 20 year old they have the energy, but if the employee is 64 about to retire? Making them stand for an entire 8 hour shift, I mean, that's how it is, but it doesn't seem cruel to you when the job doesn't require it and isn't affected by giving the 64 year old employee a stool to sit on until she retires?
This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
> This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand that their children have smartphones at school).
> Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
> And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
I think there is a difference though. There is the "off my lawn" crowd of "children today are so bad because..." sure, but I think they are not the ones demanding social media bans. The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
> So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
Just the fuck you rich, I'm buying a football team for a laugh human beings. Not that Warren would necessarily buy a football team for laugh, but that "kind".
The issue isn't that billionaires aren't human, the problem very much is that billionaires are regular petty spiteful human beings with poor judgement, impulse control, odd beliefs and an the utter lack of checks and balances that can be disregarded when a human has a billion and more.
NotAllBillionaires, sure .. but it only takes a few to screw over millions of other humans on a whim.
Frankly, imho, billionaires shouldn't even exist. No one person can get that much wealth, that much power, that much influence, without losing their humanity, their decency. It's just not possible because the only way to accrue that much wealth is to do horrifically indecent things.
So, do I recognize what you're saying? Certainly. But I won't be shedding a tear of sympathy for them. I lose all sympathy for them when they step on the necks of everyday people to get where they are.
Succeeding at business does not alone make you a billionaire; that's a whole new level above "successful business owner". Most successful business owners are millionaires but not billionaires. As I said, no one becomes a billionaire without doing horrible things because said horrible things are exactly how you amass such a large amount of wealth amongst a single person.
Also, winning the lottery to the extent of becoming a billionaire is neither common (that's the understatement of the millennium) nor a business. It is a gamble, and a gamble millions of people lose every day because they refuse or fail to understand the sheer improbability of "getting the big one" and the sheer degree to which said gambles are stacked against the "player".
> As I said, no one becomes a billionaire without doing horrible things because said horrible things are exactly how you amass such a large amount of wealth amongst a single person.
Not exactly true.
Andrew Forrest became a billionaire via Fortescue Metals and leveraging development of vast iron ore fields for sale to China. Since then he's focused on renewable energy to reduce harmful emissions in resource mining. He has skated some questionable activities in a humane and considered way but he's far from scum of the earth.
Gina Rinehart became a billionaire by virtue of being born to a self made billionaire. Her father got there by mining Blue Asbestos and exporting lung disease across the planet, followed up by also exploiting iron ore fields (although decades prior to Forrest). Lang Hancock (the father of Rinehardt) was a person of questionable values, Gina is a terrible human being with scany regard for others.
The same Andrew Forrest whose company were found to have knowingly destroyed hundreds of local Australian aboriginal sacred sites in its mining operations? Also, he's a billionaire. He may not be "scum of the earth", and maybe he's tried to do better in his latter days, but he still got horrifically rich off of everyday workers' sweat, injuries, and hardships (mining is no joke).
Besides, this philanthropy is largely just token restitution, at best. No one needs to be that wealthy to live more than comfortable. If he really wanted to help the world, he would use enough of his wealth so as to no longer be a billionaire.
People vastly underestimate just how much a billion dollars is compared to a million dollars, or even 500 million dollars. He could literally give away 99% of his wealth and still "only" have 10 million dollars. And as of of 2023 he had 33 times that much.
No one needs to hog that much of the world's resources. It is neither just nor equitable.
Are you comfortable blaming individuals like Forrest for the destruction that global consumption of iron, copper, and renewables brings, or would you rather 'fess up to collective responsiblity?
The largest Copper resource in the US currently is on naive American sacred land, and the latest proposal for providing rare earth elements essntial for modern lifestyles would disrupt a river system that spans a land area similar in size to Texas.
Do you wish to blame Forrest for these things, or the end customers and their demands?
NB: I've things to attend to now, I'll be back in some hours if you've an interest in all this.
It is our collective society's fault, yes, but the billionaires are the ones who exploit it. They are just as bad, if not worse.
Also, apologies, but I edited my above comment, and wasn't able to submit it before you replied.
And no worries. Good luck on your things. Honestly, I'm kinda done with this conversation, as interesting as it has been. It feels like it's run its course.
It's a pity you bailed, no drama - it's an area of long term interest to me and from the look of your comment you've never worked in mining, you've assumed Forrest never has, nor worked the land, and took an ankle deep search for "bad things about Forrest".
The interesting thing about Forrest is he grew up on Aboriginal land side by side with aboriginal people who themselves have deeply divided views about their past and their future - Forrest has gone well out of his way to provide jobs and education for native people and to sit down at length and discuss deeply contentious issues.
In a domain rife with trolley problems he's been considerably better than most, still with unavoidable warts, and hasn't blown up and destroyed anything on the order of that which Rio Tinto and US Gas companies have.
If you lack any on the ground local context and knowledge there's no shartage of bad press about Forrest, he gets no end of it from the likes of Gina Rhinehart, Clive Palmer, and other resource billionaires who despise him for turning much of his wealth to a greater good (an area of debate, of course) and suggesting that others do the same.
I've known both her and Forrest pretty much my entire life, her land is just to north of where Forrest is operating, she is dealing with many issues - some of which are touched upon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt6Hmp9ndkI
( Mainly about Canada, but comes back to touch upon Jill's 50,000 year strong family art collection )
> It is our collective society's fault, yes, but the billionaires are the ones who exploit it.
I'd be interested in your suggestions for how to do better.
Bear in mind that if individual billionaires were not operating here then the demand for resources would still exist and would be met by corporations (eg: Rio Tinto) who would chew through the landscape just as you claim others do: https://antar.org.au/issues/cultural-heritage/the-destructio...
I mean Masa will make you a billionaire if you just have a shit business idea you’re enthusiastic enough about, no need to be a terrible person.
Compared to the amount of billionaires there are also relatively many lottery jackpots that will get you there if you just stick your winnings in an index fund.
Not to mention that there’s a decent amount of people who become billionaires by just working on relatively boring ”normal” business like real estate development, where some luck, good decisions and leveraging bank loans will get you there without having to be a slumlord or doing anything terrible.
> The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
Do the stats prove that cell phones are the cause of the dire mental health indicators? Or at least that there is a correlation?
"but this time it's different" has also been a universal historical argument
>The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture.
Honestly you could just cut and paste the same arguments about jazz music in the 1920s or rock music in the later 20th century and they'd be indistinguishable. Just replace the mentions of jazz with social media topics and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether it was an article today or 100 years ago. "Health professionals" wringing hands about social media and jazz music in hilariously similar terms a century apart to a bunch of old people who are convinced the kids these days are going to shit because of the things they like to pay attention to.
Young people ARE SUPPOSED TO make poor decisions and be stressed out about it.
Middle aged people are supposed to clutch their pearls and wail about how this time it's different and truly awful (but what we did as kids was reasonable)
Making bad decisions is only a net benefit if they can recover from them in time. Then it becomes a lesson and not an anchor. With addictive behaviors like drugs, nicotine included… making the early mistake ends up being a permanent mistake.
> This time might be different. But it's probably not.
And this is an appeal to tradition.
This article[1] from 2024 discusses this the studies on this topic. It seems to me the results are mixed, but conclusions range between social media being neutral to harmful. There is a lot in that article, so it's worth a read.
When appealing to the authority of academic studies, it's very important to be aware of the replication crisis for studies in the field of Psychology specifically, which is one of the worst offenders. Reproducibility has been found to be as low as 36% [1].
That was not an appeal to the authority of academic papers so much as the OP trying to give context for the information that has informed their position.
Your responses have been an appeal to tradition (“every generation thinks that”), and a dismissal of the information because of the reproducibility crisis.
Ie you are arguing that we (humans) struggle with discerning Truth, and therefore we are wrong, and everything is fine.
But taking the negative position is just as epistemologically flawed. Hence the OPs attempt to discuss the best data we can find.
Letting people figure out cigarettes were bad for them took a very long time, and if social media is another form of addiction why not treat it how we treat other addictive products?
We could assume that this time is different and people, well children and minors specifically, will learn to avoid the addiction rather than banning them like alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.
This time might be different. But it's probably not.
There was a - very similar - moral panic in the 1700s about young people 'reading excessively', which was blamed for escapism, unhappiness[1] and even increases in suicide rates (see: Werther Effect). The language used was 'reading addiction' - much like todays 'smartphone addiction' or, more modern, AI-related 'illnesses'.
Today, the panic is that kids read too little, or the wrong stuff.
What is and isn't societally desirable changes. The tactic to ban the currently undesirable behaviour persists. Moral panics tell us more about generational dynamics and power structures than the medium itself..
Increased suicide rates were being discussed, and there were doctors claiming they had empirical evidence (worse eyesight, loss of sense of reality, 'melancholy' (aka: depression) ...).
Of course, that was 200 years ago, so our standards of 'rigorous empiricism' can hardly be compared to what they had. But the patterns still are eerily similar.
Also, note how modern diagnostics not only concern the well-being of the media-consuming/delusional individual, but also their environment. Polemically speaking: You can be perfectly happy being weird, if your environment feels negatively affected by you, you technically still are a psychiatrical case and need 'fixing' according to the DSM.
Hell is other people, only the young can defend themselves and their interests less and are easier being picked on.
Just nitpicking your first sentence: prohibition broadly works, just in the US (at least) it breeds negative externalities that don't seem worth it in balance.
Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever.
My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
It's not that hard to drive a car! Unfortunately, physics motivates us to have unreasonable expectations of our drivers, like "doesn't drive off the road at 100km/h ever", and "avoids all obstacles all of the time". That's the hard part.
>My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard and if you have the attitude that things aren't hard that tends to be true. Don't set your kid up for failure.
Driving on the farm is actually a lot different, you usually have no more than one or two other drivers, but there's no rules. You have to know where everybody is, know what they intend to do, and know whether or not they know where you are and if they can see you.
it makes people much better and more patient drivers because you can't just rely on traffic laws you have to know the intention of somebody in a piece of machinery and if they plan to back up or where they're going and what's in their head... and how to communicate with hands or a yell
Many countries have the driving license at 16. In France it’s accompanied by a parent; in USA it’s the full driving license (I’ve learnt at 13 and never had an accident for 30 years). 16 is ok if you withstand peer pressure.
Insurance and actuarial science is some of the most data-drivenwork we have. It is incredibly hard to withstand peer pressure and there is not much wrong in admitting what the data has already proven.
Teachers are not good indicators of measuring 'benefits', as they are both the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body, they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be, and they are also grading the success - which all too often comes down to compliance.
That's why if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are diametral or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test. If control group with smartphones gets consistently less points by graders who do not know them or their smartphone habits as compared to those who live in digital exile, we can talk. Until then, 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study. For me, that's an indication that the outrage is pearl-clutching.
How do you a double blind sutdy on smartphones? It seems to me that the group that would get smartphone would understand they’re the smartphone group, and the one without would know they don’t have one.
I didn't claim the participants wouldn't know whether they own a phone - obviously they would. I said they wouldn’t know they’re in a study whose purpose is to correlate smartphone use with academic performance.
That's perfectly compatible with a double-blind setup:
* the *students* just think they’re taking standardized tests, not that the effects of their smartphone habits are being monitored;
* the *graders* don’t know whose tests belong to whom.
That’s about as "double blind" as social-science research gets. The commenter I replied to latched onto the literal impossibility of hiding the phone itself, not the intentional design of the experiment.
> they are... the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body
> 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
To clarify, do you think that phones or the removal of phones leads to these outcomes? Do you think that teachers like or dislike phones? Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?
> they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be
Some do. Are teachers the only ones?
> if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are [detrimental] or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test.... Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study.
I am not sure how you would set this up in a way that does not fall victim to a dozen confounding variables. There have been comparisons of standardized tests before and after phone bans, of course, but those also fall victim to similar statistical issues.
> Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?
My point is that if you ask wagonmakers what they think about cars, you won't get many positive replies, but enthsiastic ones where city governments decide to go full Amish. New times and new technology necessitate changing the craft, and the methods of yesteryear, though trained into teachers, just don't work anymore. Change is scary.
You also can't have double-blind study on something both the participant and teacher know is present or not.... But that doesn't mean the study is invalid, it just means you have to account for it.
I did close to the same with my kids.. their PCs were in a common room, they got their first phone at 14 and it stayed at the downstairs charging station at night until 17. IMO it worked great and both our kids have a healthy relationship with their phones and tech in general.
When I say they have a "healthy relationship with tech" it doesn't mean they don't use tech, they both are heavily into tech, but don't let it impact their life adversely. It is more a balance that works for that individual than a preference for real vs. tech.
I'm not sure how I feel about making it illegal, but it does benefit from some sort of collective action.
If none of your child's friends and classmates have cell phones yet, I'd strongly encourage establishing a smartphone pact with the other parents. Our community used http://waituntil8th.org pledges but even a shared spreadsheet would work.
> the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards
True, but that's why you don't do it alone. You need to talk with other parents and encourage them to talk to others until the majority of parents understand the risks and let the administration, school board, and teachers know that they have your support.
All that local level stuff doesn’t work. As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone, the online world becomes vastly more interesting than the day to day.
I can't speak to anyone else, but it seems to be working well enough in our town. The overwhelming majority of kids don't have cell phones until high school. That doesn't mean your kids won't beg you for a smartphone, it just means you can say "no" without socially isolating them.
> As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone
The point is to engage in collective action early enough that you can prevent these situations in the first place. Once a critical mass of kids have smartphones and their socialization and coordination moves to online spaces it becomes intensely isolating to be the only kid in a friend group without a smartphone.
Collective action that is effective is hard to pull off in a million homes a million times around the country. Most people without extra time and resources are just not going to do it which at this point is a large part of the country. It’s like advocating for town level collective action on alcohol or age of consent. It’s way more sensible to just make it law.
> Collective action that is effective is hard to pull off in a million homes a million times around the country.
True, but it is significantly easier for a single motivated individual to pull it off in their own community than for them to change laws at the territory/state or country/federal level.
And even if your end goal is a universal law, it usually makes sense to start at the lowest level from a process perspective. Laws at the community level are often a precursor to laws at the territory/state level, just as territory/state laws can be a precursor to country/federal laws. In the USA, both alcohol and age of consent laws have gone through (and in some respects are still going through) this process. Bypassing this (admittedly slow) laboratory of democracy to implement novel laws directly at the country/federal level results in controversial laws that often have unintended consequences.
> It’s way more sensible to just make it law.
Centralizing laws can be sensible if you're somewhat confident that the people writing and enforcing those laws will behave sensibly.
I fully agree. There should be a complete ban on social media and similar addictive platforms for those under 16, and a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users aged 16 to 18.
I agree, and this is easy to implement. My kids have to hand over their phones every day before bedtime. I see no need for any institutional interference to implement such trivial policy in any family.
> We basically give cigarettes to children.
In my opinion, this is not a good comparison. Just because parents give their kids smartphones doesn't mean they want or force them to use social networks. Kids use them because it's socially acceptable, and they aren't warned against using them.
When I was a kid, my father sometimes asked me to go to the store to buy cigarettes for him. At that time, this was a socially acceptable thing for a parent to do. However, the problem of kids smoking cigarettes was almost non-existent. This is because every kid was strongly advised that only adults could do this. There would be consequences if you didn't obey this advice. By the way, I never started smoking.
It is absurd to suggest that children should not be allowed to socialize online. Have we completely forgotten the internet we grew up on? I would be dead if I hadn't been able to make friends online.
When I was a kid I joined a random BBCode forum with a group of 10 people who taught me how to program. There were challenges some passionate person set up and he would give tips to me and a few others for free. We hung out all day. That's gone.
Why not vice tax the operators? Easier than using age verification schemes and giving them even more data, chat control etc. I'm thinking tiktok, meta and x. Want to operate in Denmark? The license will cost $N/person/month where the amount of people equals the country's population. It's basically a viewer tax.
> As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15.
I see no logic in the above statement. You gave your kid a smartphone when she was 14. By today's standards, that's very late, and it's basically just one year before Denmark's proposed ban on social media. You can ban your child from having a smartphone for an arbitrary amount of time, but they are a future adult. Adults use smartphones. You can either prepare your child for the potential negatives of smartphone use, or they will learn that through their own experience later. There's no escaping smartphones and social networks.
The only way to deal with this is to talk to your kids, warn them, and educate them. I gave my kids smartphones when they were 8 and 9 years old. Those phones were fully managed by me, and the only web pages they could access were their school pages and Wikipedia. Every year, I relaxed these restrictions and frequently talked to them about the dangers of social media. Now, they have almost fully unrestricted phones, and I don't think there's anything to worry about.
The problem with social media for kids and teens is constant comparison. Any kind of comparison, but predominantly about visual appearance. Most people will never win this fight, and I believe it is a parent's role to explain this to their children. Banning smartphones or social media won't save anyone from facing the reality later on.
I think of it like the time when Hong Kong was flooded with Opium.
"adults smoke opium"
If you find that too crass, there are countless other ways to put it:
"adults eat sugar"
"adults watch TV"
Just because everyone in the mainstream does something, DOES NOT mean that this is a good thing or a smart thing to do.
In fact, we can easily observe that the few adults who are at the absolute top of their game, the most skilled, the most wealthy, the most powerful... well guess what? They DO NOT use smartphones. They don't tweet. They don't have profiles anywhere.
Except for GPS directions, there is actually very very little actual need to use a smartphone. At work, you have a computer for access to Google. At home, you have a tablet or TV or books or a Kindle for media consumption.
You can just swipe a credit card for payments.
A smartphone is not at all needed to be a highly functioning adult.
In fact - it actually prevents you from ever unlocking your fullest potential by removing any chance for your brain to ever catch a breath and just be bored for half an hour and hear your own thoughts.
That's a bad comparison. The main reason for importing opium to Hong Kong at that time was to use it as a sedative drug. Smartphones, on the other hand, have many legitimate uses for every user. The addiction to social networks is not a primary motivation to sell smartphones.
> A smartphone is not at all needed to be a highly functioning adult.
It depends on your definition of "highly functioning." You probably also don't need a Google account, a tablet, a TV, books, or a Kindle to be a highly functioning adult. I guess I can just go on. Arguing this way is meaningless.
When your kid reports that 90% of the other kids in their classroom already have a smartphone, you either give your kid a smartphone or make them feel like a loser in their social group.
Besides, having a smartphone doesn't mean having access to social networks, the open internet, or the ability to install any application. It's up to parents to properly configure parental controls for the respective age group.
> Except for GPS directions, there is actually very very little actual need to use a smartphone.
It conveniently replaces many things, usually in a more secure way. For example, paying with a phone is more secure than paying with a plastic card. And most importantly, kids listen to music on their smartphones, just as I used a Walkman/Discman in the past.
> In fact, we can easily observe that the few adults who are at the absolute top of their game, the most skilled, the most wealthy, the most powerful... well guess what? They DO NOT use smartphones. They don't tweet. They don't have profiles anywhere.
Terrence Tao regularly posts on Mastodon, and Geoffrey Hinton on X/Twitter. Sam Altman has a huge X presence. Elon Musk, no comment.
Or parents could just take responsibility for their own children and not buy them a phone instead of outsourcing their parental responsibilities to the government.
It’s not 1995 any more. My 13 year old gets social contact doing things like playing Minecraft with people from school, organised via WhatsApp with group chats and then yelling about diamond swords and lava chickens or whatever.
There’s then the simple reality that most schools require smartphones for things like homework. It’s set on devices you can only access via an app. Ok maybe you could run some form of android emulator and maybe that works and maybe they can’t do the homework on the bus on the way home and instead can just stare out of the window, but then the teachers tell them to do something in class.
Then once they leave home at 18 and get introduced to something which has been banned yet is completely normal, they go overboard anyway.
Those very responsible would likely do that. But then you have a spectrum from "fully responsible but on occasions slip" to "not responsible at all". You can help some make the "good" decision and prevent others from making "bad" decisions. Hopefully those who grew up with healthier environments will have higher chances for becoming "fully responsible".
My wife and I have this discussion on a regular basis. We want kids, but we've both had to navigate technology usage without any guide, and I've personally experienced how ruinous a smartphone can be.
We want to teach our children how to _responsibly_ use technology. We're still not sure what that looks like in detail, but the general agreement we've come to is something like 'no screens before age X'.
Denmark's government has authoritarian aims and are one of the primary groups pushing chat control in the EU. I think you are falling for the "think of the children..." fallacy here.
This is a stepping stone towards further control elsewhere, especially once a framework for enforcement is in place (which nobody actually thinks about when emotionally reacting to feel-good ideas like this). How easy would it be to expand ID based age enforcement to tracking ALL online activity and cracking down on "non-approved" speech? No thanks. I'll handle parenting myself.
Also, if you don't care about the age number, and think social media is just objectively bad...why are you on this social media site? Isn't posting here the definition of hypocrisy...given you're supporting what you believe to be worse than cigarettes?
I don't think HN is a social media site. The goals of a social media site is to keep you engaged for as long as possible with the assistance of various algorithms, dark patterns while your data is sold to businesses so they can have a slice of your attention pie via ads and supported content.
I dont feel as if any of that applies here. In fact HN has gotten further from a social media site by not displaying comment points.
You can argue this, but if you hand over this authority to government, it will not be up to you.
Fundamentally this is an upvote driven social media platform no different from Reddit, which everyone agrees is social media.
If you live in Denmark, get ready to tie your State ID to your HN profile to login and hope that you don't say anything that would make the wrong official (or your employer) upset with you.
As we know from history, well-intentioned government laws have zero unintended consequences, always work perfectly every time, and are very easy to remove once they've been created...
Happen to be a Dane and I fully agree with your sentiment. I happen to agree (I think) that keeping children away from social media on a large scale, to avoid social isolation for those who might opt out of choice, might be overall good for the children. But the means that will likely be required to do so are, like you say, essentially more steps towards mass surveillance. And like you say, laws that can be exploited so easily by a government in bad faith are so dangerous to allow into public law, even in times when exploitation seems unlikely, because they'll likely never be removed (hah) or even amended before it's too late. Like Chat Control (though it seems pretty clear to _me_ that that is set up for abuse to begin with). I'm so embarrassed we're spearheading that abomination.
"Old media" was (and is) quite heavily regulated. Not everywhere turned into an East German surveillance state.
The idea that governments are incapable of acting in the interests of their citizens is just a narrative designed to weaken public democratic institutions and hand power to the real authoritarians.
Old media the three networks censored so much and the rise of cable allowed a more open playing field where someone could swear or show an HBO gritty cop show that mirrored reality.
Whenever a politician wants you to think of the children, you should be alert. What we see Danish politicians push for is the same we see in England. I don't think Danish politicians are acting on their own, it is much more likely that this is a push from EU.
I would be pretty happy about social media being banned for everyone if not the immense possibilty for the government to abuse this law to disrupt undesired communication altogether.
Technically true but I've found it to be less addictive than other text forums (like the R-site and Lemmy), let alone the algo-powered video-based abominations that normies are all hooked on.
I'm thinking that it comes down to one thing in particular: the absence of response notifications. There's only so much addiction you can get out of a page of text without so much as a bell icon.
I know what you mean, but I think the issue is not social media, but rather big corporations being shitty. PepsiCo makes addictive beverages that cause people develop to diabetes and heart disease, but that doesn't mean beverages should be illegal. I think it would be better to regulate or ban the specifically harmful things, rather than a blanket ban on something that is actually useful. And like you alluded to, banning social media could easily lead to a general crackdown on freedom of expression, journalism, etc, now that it is the primary way people communicate with one another.
I'll also add that I'm not specifically opposed to banning minors from using social media. It would probably also be better if it was illegal for children to buy their own soda tbh.
> Dorothy, who runs an Ariana Grande fan account, was suffering through a typical teenage nightmare: Her mom took away her phone. But the resourceful teen didn't let that stop her from communicating with her followers. First, she started using Twitter on her Nintendo DS, a handheld video game device.
> Sometime after finding her DS, it was taken again, so Dorothy started tweeting from yet another connected device: her fridge. "My mom uses it to google recipes for baking so I just googled Twitter," she told CBS News.
And I'm pretty sure she did it just for laughs. I also built a listening device to hear what my mom was saying when I wasn't there. But it was too boring to me to actually listen to the conversations, I don't think I ever actually did it. But I did enjoy immensely setting it up.
Let's do away with the laws requiring shops to check ID before selling cigarettes. After all, a parent can simply tell their child not to smoke cigarettes and that's clearly good enough, right? All in the name of less government, which is clearly the most important priority here.
That system has massive holes. Using convenience store employees many recent immigrants to be the gatekeeper to cigarettes for your kids seems foolish. Who trusts that last line of defense? If a kid fails at once location another location will succeed and there are no punishment for attempting to purchase underage.
You make a persuasive case, but nicotine is genuinely addictive. Something to do with releasing stored glucose and substituting for food, and causing irritability on what I take to be a physiological level on withdrawal. Otherwise I'd agree.
But in this context, is it so important to distinguish between whether something is physiologically addictive vs. just seriously habit-forming? Except for substances where withdrawal is genuinely life-threatening, the practical difference seems to be in degree, not kind. Nicotine withdrawal causes irritability, but (I know having experienced both) so can breaking a bad social media habit.
(And it seems like there's a physiological basis to both cases, it's just that one involves endogenous chemicals and the other doesn't)
If all the other kids are on social media all the time, it makes it much harder to keep your kids off it. Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online? Would you want that for your kids?
Bans like this make much more sense at a community level. Not an individual level.
The idea that it's "hard" therefore we need government to save us is exactly why the program itself will never work. The problem is much deeper than law or government can fix.
You don’t need the government. Just some form of collective action.
I know of plenty of alternative communities & schools in which all the parents agreed to keep their kids away from phones until they were 15 or something. Great! If you try to roll something like this out to state schools, it looks like “the government”. But it’s the same idea.
I don’t understand the hatred and mistrust of government in this thread. The government protects us from lead in our food, from underage drug use, unsafe roads and lots of other stuff. Why not social media too?
> Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online?
I mean, who cares what the kid wants? It's your job as a parent to be a parent. Sometimes that means telling your kid no, even if that means they're not your best friend for a day or two.
> Would you want that for your kids?
Unequivocally, yes. Social media is cancer. I'd prefer my daughter not be pathologically depressed and my son not turn into a little hateball because of Meta's shitty algorithms. I have no idea why this is even a question, aside from the pure cowardice of Millennial parents.
None of this to comment on GP's suggestion that we don't need laws, or the idea that we shouldn't do this societally anyways.
Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level. This is terrible "we'll make it up on volume" logic.
It's also the justification used for some of the dumbest laws in history.
Think about what level of enforcement is going to be required for this (National IDs tied to online activity), and then think about the fact that Denmark is one of the main governments pushing chat control. Now start to think about how, once this tracking/enforcement scheme is created, that it might be expanded to things outside the scope of this law.
Like communism, this idea sounds good in theory, but is going to turn into an authoritarian nightmare in practice.
> Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level.
Social media itself doesn’t make sense at an individual level. If you’re the only one on a discord server, it’s not much of a party.
Personally I’m happy for some countries trying this. Let’s run the experiment and see how it goes. I too worry about the age verification system. Let’s see if the mental health of young people actually improves and by how much.
Rest assured, if the US couldn’t take collective action in the face of a global pandemic, there’s no way a law like this will come for America.
Then give parents the tools they need! I can reliably black hole all social media on my home network, and can configure DNS on their phones to do similar. A lot of that knowledge I picked up working in tech, but no tech company is going to offer such robust solutions to parents.
For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids. More importantly the constant appeal to the responsibility of parents misses that this is a collective action problem.
The reason most parents give up to regulate their children's online activity is because the children end up isolated if an individual household prevents their kid from socializing online. All the other kids are online, therefore switching individually ends in isolation. What might be beneficial for each household is unworkable as long as there is no collective mechanism. (which is the case for virtually every problem caused by social networks)
> For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids
This one hit me recently. My 4th grader has a friend who is on tik-toc and has a phone. Me, living in a bubble, where other parents I've met are terrified of social media and phones for their kids, was shocked when I met the mom and she wasn't aware of all the negative impact of social media. But, like with smokers, you can tell them it's bad for you but it's up to them to quit.
oh yeah, children famously do what their parents are told. especially when it comes to interacting with their friends. and they never are more adept at understanding technology and circumventing parental controls.
How about you parent your kid instead of trying to get the government to parent everyone else's? What the hell is you and everyone else's problem who want to get into other families' business.
A late reply to your outrage: I said I'm in favor, I'm not trying to parent your kids, but the effects of putting a phone (or similar) into most peoples' hands is easily observable and marked. I'm not limiting this to children. I observe it in my father who is 75 and I never would have imagined that he would be addicted to his phone. I observe it in myself, despite taking what most would call extreme precautions against phone addiction.
And I especially observe in my children that whatever limit I set, they will use all of it before they do anything else. I observe kids with their chins on their chest looking at a phone and I know it's not physically healthy. All I said is it's worse than cigarettes (meaning if cigarettes are regulated, phones might outta be too), and I stand by that.
It’s just easier to do some things if they’re prohibited by law. If you don’t want children to smoke, not selling them ciggarettes is a great first step.
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you are not doing this same thing to every comment trying to remove my freedom, which then will call me some label for disagreeing with COVID policies or whatever then I can't really take any of the guidelines seriously. I was here when it was all about segregating the ones who disagreed from life, even denying healthcare while still forcing them to pay taxes.
We're way past fake politeness when the discourse is always pro war, pro xenophobia for certain acceptable targets (e.g. Russia), pro disparaging certain alleged ideologies/parties (e.g. US republican).
2020-2021 happened and there's been no apology. Till then, the biased moderation rings hollow.
I don't even know what your position or point was. It’s irrelevant. We're don't moderate for/against any side or position. We just don't have time to take that into account. The guidelines apply regardless of what you're trying to say, and we routinely get these kinds of grandiose claims about our covert motivations and biases, when the reality is far more boring: just preventing this site from turning into a flaming hellscape is a big enough task, without trying to complicate things further by promoting any particular ideology or narrative.
For what it's worth I was here behind the scenes in 2020-21, and I know very well that plenty of effort was made to give all perspectives a fair hearing.
What we're asking for is quite simple. The guidelines are a condition of participating here. A sincere effort to observe them is expected from everyone, otherwise it's fine to choose not to participate.
You realize that you're putting your "boring moderating reality" against the very real claims of goverments and people here to
- Remove people who didn't obey the house imprisonment rules during covid from society.
- Removing their jobs and ability to make a living
- Stealing their money
- Denying their ability to healthcare for any procedure
- Be put in camps permanently until they "complied" because "their body, our choice".
Once you factor that type of attack where no human rights nor Nuremberg trial result was respected, the faux civility and non bias rings absolutely hollow.
I'll try to attack their points with more faux civility like you want because staying silent is what got us there, but sometimes it may come up as more raw, since it's very easy to repeat state euphemisms to destroy people's lives but it's harder to counter permeated propaganda.
Edit: Reading my post again, it's absolutely on point. Hard to regret that. How would you write it?
Please don't try to turn this into a debate about pandemic policies. You don't know what any of us personally believed about any of it then or now, and it's nothing to do with the issue at hand.
There's no point having any guidelines or standards for the way this place operates if they change based on the particular issue of the day. The purpose of HN's guidelines is that we should be able discuss any topic, no matter how difficult, as long as we do so in the spirit of curiosity.
Outside HN there's no shortage of places where people can engage in ideological battle and vigorous protest, and I'm fully supportive of your right to do whatever you want to do to fight for the issues you believe in. Indeed, you're welcome to fight for what you believe in here too, but the way it's done on HN is through respectful conversation and persuasion, not aggression.
As for your own history here, the first time I can see moderators having to ask you to follow the guidelines is in 2014, so this pattern goes back years before the pandemic. HN is only a place where people want to come to discuss important topics because other people make the effort to raise the standards rather than dragging them down. Please be one of the ones to make this place better, not worse, otherwise you're welcome to choose not to participate here.
- I'll say goodbye for now. You've given me pause and not because I buy into the fake politeness because I think that's BS (If you may grant me that expletive).
- I think bringing 11 year old stuff (2014) without actually even putting the comment shows bad faith and an imbalance of power which tells me all I need to know not to engage further. You win. Point proven. You have power. I don't. Go pretend your world is fair and equitable but, if you have a lot of free time, do analyze how much you stopped calls for denying healthcare and putting people on camps the same way you stop someone telling others to parent their kids instead of removing their freedoms.
you can take a teen’s phone off them and they can just walk into a store and buy an inexpensive second hand handset and use the WiFi from a local cafe.
The idea of treating under 18s like they are human is extremely undesirable in the USA because it among other things opens up a lot of doctors to be held accountable for their participation in the mass mutilation of baby boys. It also holds a whole lot of physically abusive parents to a standard where their children could call CPS and get their parents in legal trouble for corporal punishment.
Of course, these are indeed good things in worlds that don't endorse physical violence as the primary method to enforce control. This is why Finland his tail docking, ear cropping, animal crating, corporal punishment, circumcision, etc bans and why the US South is so ruthless.
You are also impacted by the real life ketar SCP object that keeps the masses not caring that millions of baby boys in the USA get mutilated shortly after birth.
I am not. One day, that object will be found, shut down and destroyed. I hope you eventually see the error in your current sensibilities.
To be fair, the "War on Tobacco" has actually been a huge success[1]. I've been saying for years that we should end the War on Drugs in its current form and extend tobacco policy to other drugs. If you're old enough to drink, smoke, and get shipped off to a warzone, who is anyone else to tell you that you don't deserve the freedom to buy a bottle of pharmaceutical-grade heroin at CVS and shoot it up in the privacy of your own home?
But because we collectively insist on infantilizing ourselves, hundreds of billions of dollars per year are redirected from the pharma industry to black market criminal syndicates. Instead of funding medical research and stock buybacks, we're actively choosing to fund global chaos and mass atrocities. We could stop tomorrow, and it would cost us nothing. In fact, it would save the US billions of dollars in annual losses at all levels of government and generate billions of dollars in annual tax revenue, all of which could be used to fund things like addiction treatment services, law enforcement, and border security.
As a parent, you should be able to parent your child, rather than having the government arbitrarily and capriciously do so on your behalf, and for everyone else's kids, too.
As someone who got my first BlackBerry at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or led to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.
(Funny anecdote, but I didn't even figure out how to sign up for Facebook until I was 11-12, because I wouldn't lie about my age and it would tell me I was too young. Heh.)
First, if some parents let their kids use social media and some don't, all kids will eventually use it. You can't cut kids off from social spaces their peers are using and expect them to obey.
Second, this move by Denmark reflects a failure to regulate what social media companies have been doing to all their users.
e.g. What has Meta done to address their failures in Myanmar?[1] As little as was legally possible, and that was as close to nothing as makes no difference. More recently, Meta's own projections indicate 10% of their ad revenue comes from fraud[2]. The real proportion is almost certainly higher, but Meta refuses to take action.
Any attempts to tax or regulate American social media companies has invited swift and merciless response from the U.S. government. To make matters worse, U.S. law makes it impossible for American companies to respect the privacy of consumers in non-U.S. markets[3].
Put it all together, and American social media is something that children need to be protected from, but the only way to protect them is to cut them off from it entirely. This is the direct result of companies like Meta refusing to respond to concerns in any way other than lobbying the U.S. government to bully other nations into accepting their products as is.
Good on Denmark. I hope my own country follows suit.
Cultures around the world have barred children from certain social places until they go through a rite of passage that the whole society, not just the parents, recognize.
Yes, cultures around the world have done this through parents parenting their child successfully, and not through arbitrary government overreach telling you how to parent.
Not really. The ideal you are describing, where there is no role for the community in regulating public spaces outside the household and determining when young people can enter them, strikes me as highly unusual historically and geographically. It’s an example of that streak of libertarianism that took off from early American internet culture and hardly exists outside internet pontificating.
You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry—appropriate timing for a government to make a law to save kids from the evils of it.
> You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry
You're either operating with an anachronistic notion of what constitutes social media, or you're very out of touch with the public. Not sure which one.
The "myspaces" and "facebooks" are trending down, but other forms of social media like tiktok, discord, reddit, youtube, etc are alive and well, still hooking kids young as they always have.
i think the ban on youtube accounts will just be mildly inconvenient, like not being able to subscribe to channels, or chat in a livestream. they can't ban just watching youtube without an account.
I feel like grouping discord as something hooking kids after we teliably took their third spaces is problematic.
You wouldn't have called the equivalent when you were a kid problematic or even had a word for it. It's often just how they communicate with friends.
I feel as though algorithms dedicated to grabbing as much attention as possible are a major problem (youtube, tiktok), while notification checking on public spaces is also similarly an issue.
But is it so hard to teach your kids how to internet? Id advocate for restrictions but banning seems silly.
The issue is rather the algorithmic feed optimized for grabbing our attention. It's definitely addictive and should be regulated like other drugs.
Give people technology, but let's have an honest conversation about it finally. As a adult it's already hard to muster enough self control to not keep scrolling.
Okay, so explain this to your child, just like you tell them they shouldn't do drugs. Are there not people who are sober by choice? The only thing preventing you from going and smoking crack right now is most certainly not because it's illegal, but because you make a choice not to do so, knowing the negative effects it has on you.
I don't scroll social media. When I was 14-17, sure. But then I lost interest, much like most of my peers did.
(I do probably refresh HN more than I should though, but I think that's probably the least evil thing I could do compulsively...)
The part you’re missing is that the decision to be online isn’t like choosing to do drugs. It’s closer to deciding to go to parties and socialise at all.
Social media for teens is ubiquitous and where your peers connect. It’s being included in your social group, not opt-in thrill seeking.
Most teens will have multiple accounts for various networks - private accounts for their friends, and then again for closer friends. Or they use apps like Discord that parents have no visibility into at all. There is a lot that most parents never see.
I don't think it will ever disappear, but it certainly plays a less outsized role now than it used to, and it's not exactly an industry I see huge growth in.
What we define as "social media" I think is important. I don't really consider things like TikTok to be "social media" even if there is both a social component and a media component, since the social part is much smaller in comparison to the media part. People aren't communicating on TikTok (I think), which is what people concerned about "being left out by their peers" would be referring to. This type of "social" media probably is not dying, but I think is likely stagnant or will become stagnant in growth, while traditional "social media" continues to regress over the next decade.
Not necessarily a law, but it requires some form of collective action.
I highly recommend discussing a smartphone pact such as http://waituntil8th.org with fellow parents before anyone in their friend group gets a cell phone.
Lol you can order a cigar or pipe tobacco on the internet completely legally without any ID check. Most people don't know this. You can do it with wine, too, for the vast majority of the US. It's not really a problem.
I suspect you need a credit card though? Can kids sign credit card contracts without parent consent in the US?
Moreover just because that laws and regulations are applied inconsistently in the US (and we are talking about Denmark here), does not mean we should completely do away with them.
Not sure if it's changed but I had a debit card and bank account from age 15 when I started working as a kid. I got it without even involving my parents, not sure if you can still do that now, it was before the KYC stuff ramped up to the nines.
Parents are doing what they can, but it inevitably comes down to “but my friend x has it so why can’t I have it” - so all and any help from government / schools is a good thing.
This is so, so, so obviously a nasty, dangerous technology - young brains should absolutely not be exposed to it. In all honesty, neither should older ones, but that’s not what we’re considering here.
I think you are massively overstating how important it is to the kids that they have a social media account. How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?
Connecting online is the primary social space for many kids nowadays, not in person.
Some parents (or those without kids) have a bit of a naive view and think ‘social media’ and just imagine Facebook, instagram etc - things they understand and that don’t provide much connection.
The kids connect using private accounts, completely different apps, or even just inside the chat of other apps like games, if that is where your specific group hangs out.
I agree with what you're saying (including saying that arcfour is out of touch and doesn't really know what they're talking about), but... I do agree with them to an extent. And I have a kid (with another along the way). Kids adapt. They want to be on social media, or games, or Discord, or whatever because their friends are. If they have enough friends in real life doing something fun, that becomes where their specific group hangs out. The number of people you need in that group before it crosses that threshold is really low... 4, 5 people? That's all you need to have a tight knit friend group.
I've seen things like after school D&D club at the elementary school down the street where my son now goes to preschool. I'm optimistic that by the time he's older, there will be even more groups like this and more opportunities for him to have friends where they're doing activities that aren't mediated by screens.
To be clear, I'm not weighing on in on whether or not I think a ban is a good idea. I tend to think it is. But I do think the idea that there's nothing parents can do from the ground up without the help of government (which I'm not opposed to!) is also a bit misguided.
That's rather rude of you, especially since I was actually a kid and grew up during the mass proliferation and ubiquity of social media, to suggest that I am "out-of-touch" compared to... you? (who are likely much older than me, or at best the same age) is pretty ridiculous. I was on Twitter and Facebook at like 12 years old, I've experienced this. And to dismissively suggest I don't know what I'm talking about, on what basis do you say that? The basis that you just disagree with me...saying that a law for this is stupid and an example of paternalistic government overreach? Many people who decidedly do know what they are talking about agree, just as there are many who disagree and know what they are talking about; simply because you are on the other side doesn't mean I must be clueless.
I don't, but I do have friends, and did have friends when I was a kid growing up during the rise and proliferation of social media and the beginnings of algorithmic content distribution, so I am familiar with it.
> How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?
Easy. If half the conversation happens online, and your kid wasn’t part of that, they’d constantly need to be “filled in” when they got to school.
Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it. You could still go to all the meetings, but there would have been conversations held and decisions made that you wouldn’t even know about. You would feel like you were on the out. Banning an individual kid from social media would be just the same.
If social media is as bad for them as you seem to think it is, then why wouldn’t it be best for them?
I’m old enough to remember the same trash arguments over video games, rap music, even (for some unknown reason) the Disney Channel. This is just another moral panic.
This is an overly simplistic, idealistic view of the world that leads to people thinking things like the OP are good and necessary. By recognizing that the world doesn't actually work this way at all—things aren't black and white, they're gray—you come to the conclusion that legislation is the worst way to solve these issues and is totally unnecessary.
> you come to the conclusion that legislation is the worst way to solve these issues and is totally unnecessary.
If you want to argue for that point of view, do so. Put forward actual arguments. Your comment reads as “if you were smart like me, you’d know I’m right”. Which is unfalsifiable and unconvincing.
That's an overly nonspecific criticism. It's more of a compliment of your own cognitive abilities rather than something tangible I can map onto my comment.
Name-calling now? I’ll give you the fourth option that you neglected to include:
- Kids continue to use social media despite the ban, with some using sketchy circumvention services or older friends to gain access, and with others driven to totally unsupervised social media in foreign countries and/or the dark web, with predictable results. The majority of kids rightly see the restrictions placed upon them as unreasonable and grow up with less respect for government and the law, broadly harming social trust as they enter adulthood.
It's a question of magnitudes. There will be at least one kid who does what you're saying, but how many? My strong intuition is that it'll be a small number, too small to cancel out the benefits. The appeal will be largely gone when the network effects are gone. So I say run the experiment in one country and observe the outcome and adjust accordingly. That is the least idealistic position.
As long as it’s not my country and you don’t try to apply your rules extraterritorially, fine. (And feel free to block US-hosted services if you don’t like the way we run things.)
Parent of a 21 and 18 year old so I’m somewhat familiar about how to do parenting, thanks.
Yes, “no” is a tool that more parents can and should reach for. But if you’ve got any experience at all of kids you’ll know it’s really not as straight forward as this. The more responsibility you can push off to others, such as government or schools, the easier this is.
We brought ours up with pretty strong guidelines and lots of “no” but we’re fortunate in having some time and some money and some knowledge about how to block stuff on the network and so on - lots of parents aren’t as lucky. They need all the help they can get.
Describe three hypotheticals to me of what you think will happen in the following circumstances:
* Kid who is told "no" by his parents
* Kid who is told "yes" by his parents
* Kid who "can't" sign up for social media because it's illegal to do so at their age, who then signs up for it when it becomes legal.
I would really like to see what you believe the outcomes of these three scenarios would be, because I doubt any of them are truly catastrophic, considering we are, at best, merely delaying the onset of social media use by the kid by just 2-3 years.
Read literally anything about brain elasticity and then come back and tell me those “just” 2—3 years are unimportant. These are key, critical years for development. Pretty much all the studies are saying it’s fucking us, and particularly our kids.
Personally I want to do something about this, and IMO every move in the direction that helps even in a small way is a good one.
Comparing the internet we grew up with and the modern internet where a army of psychologists have been unleashed with the express intent to massively increase addiction to everything they touch is very foolish
This is not about telling kids no. This is about companies (and foreign hostile governments!) worth billions of dollars openly studying how best to prey on children's minds. There are things that are just poisonous to society as a concept.
The same people demanding the anti-smart phone laws will rat your ass out the second your kid is spotted walking alone, playing independently, etc. They want to put you in a catch-22 situation.
The real problem here is way less people are parents or people that have no idea what parenting is like, so they don't understand the practicalities of raising children so they come up with the dumbest laws possible and then lord it over you with the full weigh of the state so they can pretend to be parents but with none of the responsibility and all of the smug moral superiority.
Jonathan Haidt, the most prominent psychologist pushing for restrictions on social media use for children, is also the most prominent proponent of letting kids play and roam more freely. So no, those are not the same people.
As someone who sold their first joint at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or let to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.
/s
Absolute statements like yours rarely work, because the discussion is hardly ever about absolutes and more about where to draw the line.
It'll be interesting to see what they can cook up at home. Chat Control was pushed in large part by Denmark, and Minister of Justice Peter Hummelgaard is on record saying some pretty disturbing things regarding the right to privacy online.[1] Now for this, they don't need the entire EU to go along, and any laws already on the books might prove ineffective to protect against means that end up achieving similar goals to Chat Control.
Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph, as well as letters.[2] Turns out online messaging doesn't count. It'd be a funny one to get to whatever court, because hopefully someone there will have a brain and use it, but it wouldn't be the first time someone didn't.
Whether internet is covered by § 72 seems undetermined; as far as I can tell the Supreme Court hasn't made a decision on it; but considering that it considered fake SMS train tickets to be document fraud, even though the law text never explicitly mentions text messages: it seems clear that internet communication ought to be covered, if challenged.
Regardless, this wouldn't run afoul of this. This is similar to restricting who can buy alcohol, based purely on age; the identification process is just digital. MitID - the Danish digital identification infrastructure - allows an service to request specific details about another purpose; such as their age or just a boolean value whether they are old enough. Essentially: the service can ask "is this user 18 or older?" and the ID service can respond yes or no, without providing any other PII.
That's the theory at least; nothing about snooping private communication, but rather forcing the "bouncer" to actually check IDs.
>considering that it considered fake SMS train tickets to be document fraud, even though the law text never explicitly mentions text messages
That has nothing to do with the medium of the ticket and is all about knowingly presenting a fake ticket. The ticket is a document proving your payment for travel. They could be lumps of dirt and it would still be document fraud to present a fake hand of dirt.
Except the Supreme Court deemed the case to be of a principal nature, and granted relieve (i.e. no cost to either party), since it was disputed whether a fake SMS train ticket counted as document fraud.
> Regardless, this wouldn't run afoul of this. This is similar to restricting who can buy alcohol, based purely on age; the identification process is just digital. MitID - the Danish digital identification infrastructure - allows an service to request specific details about another purpose; such as their age or just a boolean value whether they are old enough. Essentially: the service can ask "is this user 18 or older?" and the ID service can respond yes or no, without providing any other PII.
> That's the theory at least; nothing about snooping private communication, but rather forcing the "bouncing" to actually check IDs.
Hopefully the theory will reflect the real world. The 'return bool' to 'isUser15+()' is probably the best we can hope for, and should prevent the obvious problems, but there can always be more shady dealings on the backend (as if there aren't enough of those already).
Given the track record of digitalization in Denmark, you can be rest assured this will be implemented in the worst possible way.
This is Denmark. The country who reads the EU legislation requesting the construction of a CA to avoid centralizing the system and then legally bends the rules of EU and decides it's far better to create a centralized solution. I.e., the intent is a public key cryptosystem with three bodies, the state being the CA. But no, they should hold both the CA and the Key in escrow. Oh, and then decides that the secret should be a pin such that law enforcement can break it in 10 milliseconds.
I think internet verification is at least 10 years too late. Better late than never. I just lament the fact we are going to get a bad solution to the problem.
> Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph
That's very much not how danish law works. The specific paragraph says "hvor ingen lov hjemler en særegen undtaglse, alene ske efter en retskendelse." translated as "where no other law grants a special exemption, only happen with a warrant". That is, you can open peoples private mail and enter their private residence, but you have to ask a judge first.
People continue to believe that the "Grundlov" works like the US constitution, and it's really nothing like that. If anything it's more of a transfer of legislation from the king to parliament. Most laws just leaves the details to be determined by parliament.
Censorship really is one of the few laws that are pretty unambiguous, that's really just "No, never again". Not that this stops politicians, but that's a separate debate.
And yet they wanted to push a proposal where the government would have free access to all digital communication, no judge required. So if it happens through a telephone conversation, you need a judge, while with a digital message, you wouldn't have, since the government would have already collected that information through Chat Control.
> All citizens are placed under suspicion, without cause, of possibly having committed a crime. Text and photo filters monitor all messages, without exception. No judge is required to order to such monitoring – contrary to the analog world which guarantees the privacy of correspondence and the confidentiality of written communications.
And:
> The confidentiality of private electronic correspondence is being sacrificed. Users of messenger, chat and e-mail services risk having their private messages read and analyzed. Sensitive photos and text content could be forwarded to unknown entities worldwide and can fall into the wrong hands.
> No judge is required to order to such monitoring
That sounds quite extreme, I just can't square that with what I can actually read in the proposal.
> the power to request the competent judicial authority of the Member State that designated it or another independent administrative authority of that Member State
It explicitly states otherwise. A judge (or other independent authority) has to be involved. It just sounds like baseless fear mongering (or worse, libertarianism) to me.
Didn't the proposal involve automated scanning of all instant messages? How isn't that equivalent of having an automated system opening every letter and listening to every phone call looking for crimes?
Not from what I can tell. From what I can read, it only establishes a new authority, under the supervision and at the digression, of the Member state that can, with judicial approval mandate "the least intrusive in terms of the impact on the users’ rights to private and family life" detection activities on platforms where "there is evidence [... ] it is likely, [...] that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material".
That all sounds extremely boring and political, but the essence is that it mandates a local authority to scan messages on platforms that are likely to contain child pornography. That's not a blanket scan of all messages everywhere.
> platforms that are likely to contain child pornography
So every platform, everywhere? Facebook and Twitter/X still have problems keeping up with this, Matrix constantly has to block rooms from the public directory, Mastodon mods have plenty of horror stories. Any platform with UGC will face this issue, but it’s not a good reason to compromise E2EE or mandate intrusive scanning of private messages.
I would not be so opposed to mandated scans of public posts on large platforms, as image floods are still a somewhat common form of harassment (though not as common as it once was).
The proposal is about deploying automated scanning of every message and every image on all messaging providers and email client. That is indisputable.
It therefore breaks EtoE as it intercepts the messages on your device and sends them off to whatever 3rd party they are planning to use before those are encrypted and sent to the recipient.
> It explicitly states otherwise. A judge (or other independent authority) has to be involved. It just sounds like baseless fear mongering (or worse, libertarianism) to me.
How can a judge be involved when we are talking about scanning hundreds of millions if not billions of messages each day? That does not make any sense.
I suggest you re-read the Chat control proposal because I believe you are mistaken if you think that a judge is involved in this process.
I dispute that. The proposal explicitly states it has to be true that "it is likely, despite any mitigation measures that the provider may have taken or will take, that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material;"
> How can a judge be involved
Because the proposal does not itself require any scanning. It requires Member states to construct an authority that can then mandate the scanning, in collaboration with a judge.
> it is likely, despite any mitigation measures that the provider may have taken or will take, that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material
That is an absolute vague definition that basically encompasses all services available today including messaging providers, email providers and so on. Anything can be used to send pictures these days. So therefore anything can be targeted, ergo it is a complete breach of privacy.
> Because the proposal does not itself require any scanning. It requires Member states to construct an authority that can then mandate the scanning, in collaboration with a judge.
Your assertion makes no sense. The only way to know if a message contains something inappropriate is to scan it before it is encrypted. Therefore all messages have to be scanned to know if something inappropriate is in it.
A judge, if necessary, would only be participating in this whole charade at the end of the process not when the scanning happens.
> [...] By introducing an obligation for providers to detect, report, block and remove child sexual abuse material from their services, .....
It is an obligation to scan not a choice based some someone's opinion like a judge, ergo no one is involved at all in the scanning process. There is no due process in this process and everyone is under surveillance.
> [...] The EU Centre should work closely with Europol. It will receive the reports from providers, check them to avoid reporting obvious false positives and forward them to Europol as well as to national law enforcement authorities.
Again here no judge involved. The scanning is automated and happens automatically for everyone. Reports will be forwarded automatically.
> [...] only take steps to identify any user in case potential online child sexual abuse is detected
To identify a user who may or may not have shared something inappropriate, that means that they know who the sender is, who the recipient was , what bthe essage contained and when it happened. Therefore it s a complete bypass of EtoE.
This is the same exact thing that we are seeing know with the age requirements for social media. If you want to ban kids who are 16 years old and under then you need to scan everyone's ID in order to know how old everyone is so that you can stop them from using the service.
With scanning, it is exactly the same. If you want to prevent the dissemination of CSAM material on a platform, then you have to know what is in each and every message so that you can detect it and report it as described in my quotes above.
Therefore it means that everyone's messages will be scanned either by the services themselves or this task will be outsourced to a 3rd party business who will be in charge of scanning, cataloging and reporting their finding to the authorities. Either way the scanning will happen.
I am not sure how you can argue that this is not the case. Hundreds of security researchers have spent the better part of the last 3 years warning against such a proposal, are you so sure about yourself that you think they are all wrong?
> This is taken verbatim from the proposal that you can find here
You're taking quotes from the preamble which are not legislation. If you scroll down a little you'll find the actual text of the proposal which reads:
> The Coordinating Authority of establishment shall have the power to request the competent judicial authority of the Member State that designated it or another independent administrative authority of that Member State to issue a detection order
You see, a judge, required for a detection order to be issued. That's how the judge will be involved BEFORE detection. The authority cannot demand detection without the judge approving it.
I really dislike you way of arguing. I thought it was important to correct your misconceptions, but I do not believe you to be arguing in good faith.
Let me address your points here and to make it more explicit, let me use Meta/Facebook Messenger as an example.
> You see, a judge, required for a detection order to be issued. That's how the judge will be involved BEFORE detection. The authority cannot demand detection without the judge approving it.
Your interpretation of the judge's role is incorrect. The issue is not if a judge is involved, but what that judge is authorizing.
You are describing a targeted warrant. This proposal creates a general mandate.
Here is the the reality of the detection orders outlined by this proposal:
1: A judicial authority, based on a risk assessment, does not issue a warrant for a specific user John Doe who may be committing a crime.
2: Instead, it issues a detection order to Meta mandating that the service Messenger must be scanned for illegal content.
3: This order legally forces Meta to scan the data from all users on Messenger to find CSAM. It is a blanket mandate, not a targeted one.
This forces Facebook to implement a system to scan every single piece of data that goes through them, even if it means scanning messages before they are encrypted. Meta has now a mandate to scan everyone, all the time, forever.
Your flawed understanding is based on a traditional wiretap.
Traditional Warrant (Your View): Cops suspect Tony Soprano. They get a judge's approval for a single, time-limited wiretap on Tony's specific phone line in his house based on probable cause.
Detection Order: Cops suspect Tony “might” use his house for criminal activity. They get a judge to designate the entire house a "high-risk location." The judge then issues an order compelling the homebuilder to install 24/7 microphones in every room to record and scan all conversations from everyone (Tony, his family, his guests, his kids and so on) indefinitely.
That is the difference that I think you are not grasping here.
With E2E, Meta cannot know if CSAM is being exchanged in a message unless it can see the plain text.
To comply with this proposal, Meta will be forced to build a system that bypasses their own encryption. There is no other way.
This view is shared by security experts, privacy organizations, and legal experts.
You can read this opinion letter from a former ECJ judge who completely disagrees with your view here:
I am sorry if you think that I am arguing in bad faith. I am not.
While there is nothing I can do to make you like my arguing style, just know that I am simply trying to make you understand your misconceptions about this law.
> Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph, as well as letters
And this is why laws should always include their justification.
The intent was clearly to protect people - to make sure the balance of power does not fall too much in the government's favor that it can silence dissent before it gets organized enough to remove the government (whether legally or illegally does not matter), even if that meant some crimes go unpunished.
These rules were created because most current democratic governments were created by people overthrowing previous dictatorships (whether a dictator calls himself king, president or general secretary does not matter) and they knew very well that even the government they create might need to be overthrown in the future.
Now the governments are intentionally sidestepping these rules because:
- Every organization's primary goal is its own continued existence.
- Every organization's secondary goal is the protection of its members.
Banning personalised ads would solve a lot of the underlying incentives that drives the attention grabbing economy today.
Increasing the age a few years for when young people are allow to make accounts on social media is not going to make a large difference in the big picture of things, and do not address the core problem that is the collection and abuse of massive amounts of personal data.
Upping the age limit a few years is a compromise that big tech can live with. Here in Norway, we've had a 13 year limit for years, but most parents have not cared so far and help their kids register at a much earlier age anyway. This is changing though, as more people realise the downsides of addictive and manipulative apps fighting desperately for our data and attention.
It is frustrating to see how unwilling we are to address the economic incentives that causes the biggest harms.
I'm in favour of anything that tries to address the appaling effects of social media, but as long as there is advertising that will, surely, be some sort of personalisation. In the past you bought a magazine about, say, gardening, and all the ads were about gardening. The advertisers were betting that most people reading a gardening magazine were interested in gardening products, the ads were, to some degree, personalised.
If online 'personalised' ads were banned how would personalised be defined ?
If the goal is simply to make social media unprofitable, you can just be really brutal and require that all users from a language region visiting a website (or using an App) must be delivered the exact same set of ads.
The fact that most advertisers would flock to promoting on smaller special websites/apps (equivalent to your gardening magazine), is exactly the side-effect we want. The shift in spending will hopefully lead to the current "massive social media platform" model will dying out, and boosting smaller independent platforms.
Smaller platforms are worse at optimizing for engagement. It's one of those weird situations where it's a good idea precisely because it's economically inefficient.
This is the key part, isn't it? There's a large degree of difference between "these garden magazine readers might enjoy these gardening ads" and "based on our profile of you collected over 15 years and including every single bit of private data we can acquire about you, we think you might like..."
Personally I think any advertising targeted at children should be banned, but I guess that's probably too extreme.
Ads that could be interpreted as targeted towards children is banned in Norway. Unfortunately we have not managed to enforce this sensible law in the digital realm, where children are routinely and brutally pillaged for their habits an behaviors and shown ads based on their insecurities and fumbling step into the wider world. It is truly sickening to observe society's naïveté, and especially how big tech (and thus data harvesting) has become a mandatory part of schools now, where every child is provided with personal device at the age of 6.
> If online 'personalised' ads were banned how would personalised be defined ?
Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. I'm not against contextually relevant ads. Ads related to gardening makes sense in a magazine about gardening. There is no need to aggregate enormous amounts of personal data in such a scenario because the topic of the magazine (or webpage) is enough to give an idea of the type of readers you get.
I was talking about the current prevailing practice of collecting massive amounts of personal data, fine grained enough to make a psychological profile more detailed than what your closest family and friends could produce. Just to show you ads!
Context can be deduced from the topic of a website, no need to collect, package and sell data so intimate that it could be used against you in horrific ways by the higest bider, be it a nation state or a company.
Seems like an attempt to enforce government ID identification and destroy online anonymity to «protect the children», the very same way it's been done in Britain.
How will they achieve that without introducing a requirement to identify yourself on every online platform, which some would say is probably the whole reason for introducing something promoted as being "for the children"™.
You don't think that the digital ID provider is keeping logs of which sites requested to verify which users? Even government websites are not exactly known for their high security.
The digital ID provider is only involved in issuing the ID to you. When you use that ID to verify age to a site the only communication is between your phone and the site. The ID provider has no idea when you use the ID, how often you use the ID, or where you use the ID.
Briefly, when the ID provider issues the ID it gets cryptographically bound to your phone. When you use the ID to prove something to a site (age, citizenship, etc) the is done by using a zero-knowledge proof based protocol that allows your phone to prove to the site (1) that you have an ID issued by your ID provider, (2) that ID is bound to your phone, (3) the phone is unlocked, and (4) the thing you are claiming (age, citizenship, etc) matches what the ID says. This protocol does not convey any other information from or about your ID to the site.
This doesn't work because you can't prove the origin of a single bit of data without the associated identity and the origin of the data can only be verified by matching the biometric image on the ID against your real face with a camera.
Otherwise a single person could donate their ID card and let everyone else authenticate with it.
Now you might counter and say it would be enough to give each card a sequential number independent of the person's identity, but then you run into another problem. Each service might accept each card only once, but there are many services out there, so having a few thousand donations could be enough to cover exactly the niche sites that you don't want kids to see.
There is no way to implement this without a complete authoritarian lockdown of everything. There will always be people slipping past the cracks. This means all this will ever amount to is harm reduction, but nobody is selling it on that platform. Nobody is saying that they are okay with imperfect compromises.
Ah, so your phone is the trust point. That's better than it could have been, but it still leaves other issues, like sites with multiple domains or data brokers cross-identifying you based on phone and user information, e.g. 'this phone verified someone on porn site A. This same phone over on social media site B also verified, and on the social media site they have all their real-world info, so now we know their interests', etc.
And before anyone asserts that the phone can be anonymous, that doesn't work, otherwise you can just have an app that claims to have a verified ID attached.
The difference is meaningful. It's mostly prisoners dilemma. If only one persons porn habit is available thats bad for them. If everyones (legal) porn habits are available, then it gets normalized.
Normalized or not, the risk is you get something akin US drug enforcement: ignored for certain demographics, enforced for others. The ability to see someone's porn history is irrelevant until a government (or employer perhaps) wants to weaponize it.
The problem isn't my peers, it's the people in power and how many of them lack any scruples.
this seems to run parallel to the "i have nothing to hide" / "well they have everyone's data, so who cares about mine" arguments.
this is too narrow a view on the issue. the problem isn't that a colleague, acquaintance, neighbor, or government employee is going to snoop through your data. the problem is that once any government has everyone's data, they will feed it to PRISM-esque systems and use it to accurately model the population, granting the power to predict and shape future events.
Would social networks accepting Danish users have to implement the other end of that, or will they also be allowed to use less privacy-oriented age verification solutions (e.g. requesting a photocopy of the user's ID)?
It seems to me like it's either a privacy disaster waiting to happen (if not required) or everyone but the biggest players throwing out a lot of bathwater with very little baby by simply not accepting Danish users (if required).
The wording on the page also makes it sound like their threat model doesn't include themselves as a potential threat actor. I absolutely wouldn't want to reveal my complete identity to just anyone requesting it, which the digital ID solution seems to have covered, but I also don't want the issuer of the age attestation to know anything about my browsing habits, which the description doesn't address.
> everyone but the biggest players throwing out a lot of bathwater with very little baby by simply not accepting Danish users (if required).
The biggest players in social media are precisely the ones that this law is targeting.
No one in charge of implementing this law is going to care whether some Mastodon server implements a special auth solution for Danish users or not, they are going to care that Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc. do so.
> No one in charge of implementing this law is going to care whether some Mastodon server implements a special auth solution for Danish users or not, they are going to care that Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc. do so.
And if that little Mastodon server ends up hosting some content that is embarrassing or offensive to the Danish authorities, laws like this will surely not be used to retaliate...
Arbitrarily and selectively enforced laws seem like an obviously bad thing to me. If the government can nail me for anything, even if they practically don't, I'll be very wary of offending or embarrassing the government.
the social media platforms already measure more than enough signals to understand a users likely age. they could be required by law to do something about it
It would be a lot simpler to only sell standard devices to adults. Kids should be using devices with curated access to specific tools and platforms meant for children.
we get to see how it works in australia next month. there's already stories of kids putting on fake mustaches to fool age-of-face recognition, which is one of the methods used.
i think it'll get to: "these methods aren't good enough, we'll have to enforce digital id".
the EU is working on a system for age verification that won't identify you to the platform. The details are of course complicated, but you can imagine an openid like system run by the government that only exposes if you're old enough for Y.
The platforms asks your government if you're old enough. You identify yourself to your government. Your government responds to the question with a single Boolean.
You don't need to, that's the thing. The site requests "are you over 18" and you use your ID to prove it without them getting any other information from it. Requires a phone with NFC, but the app is open source
And the reference implementation requires google play integrity attestation so you are forced to use a google approved device with google approved firmware and a google account to download the application in order to participate. Once this becomes implemented, you are no longer a citizen of the EU but a citizen of Google or Apple and a customer of the EU:
How does the site verify that the ID being used for verification is the ID of the person that is actually using the account? How does the site verify that a valid ID was used at all?
If the app is open source, what stops someone from modifying it to always claim the user is over 18 without an ID?
I think that ends up being a more difficult problem than just open source. There will have to be some cryptography at play to make sure the age verification information is actually attested by your government.
It would be possible for them to provide an open-source app, but design the cryptography in such a way that you couldn't deploy it anyway. That would make it rather pointless.
I too hope they design that into the system, which the danish authorities unfortunately don't have a good track record of doing.
*Only for Google Android and Apple iOS users. Everyone else who don't want to be a customer of these two, including GrapheneOS and LineageOS users, will have to upload scans of identity papers to each service, like the UK clusterfuck.
Source: I wrote Digitaliseringsstyrelsen in Denmark where this solution will be implemented next year as a pilot, and they confirm that the truly anonymous solution will not be offered on other platforms.
Digitaliseringsstyrelsen and EU is truly, utterly fucking us all over by locking us in to the trusted competing platforms offered by the current American duopoly on the smartphone market.
Why? It's not because a hardware token based solution that will work on desktops is technically impossible, but they literally wrote me that they have no plans to investigate the possibility of offering that. This is officially the plan for the permanent solution.
Child abuse is already illegal, the law needs to be expanded to cover these new forms of harm to children. It seems reasonable that I am held criminally accountable if I expose my child to harmful Internet content like social media.
I was thinking I know a few people over 65 who are being radicalised, might be an idea to ban it for them too.
The serious answer is that banning "social media" is a bit silly. We should concentrate on controlling the addictive aspects of it, and ensuring the algorithms are fair and governed by the people.
Even if you're half-joking, there's a very real point to this. It's really not solving the problem. It's moving it very so slightly down the line.
I'm not entirely sure how I'd want to word it, but it would be something like: It is prohibited to profit from engagement generated by triggering negative emotions in the public.
You should be free to run a rage-bait forum, but you cannot profit from it, as that would potentially generate a perverse incentive to undermine trust in society. You can do it for free, to ensure that people can voice their dissatisfaction with the government, working conditions, billionaires, the HOA and so on. I'd carve out a slight exception for unions being allowed to spend membership fees to run such forums.
Also politicians should be banned from social media. They can run their own websites.
In principle, certainly. In practice, Congress can't be trusted to craft more or less any law these days. I'm not necessarily sure that the law will be able to help us here, but I also think it's not helpful to take the broadest possible definition of social media to try to shutdown discussion. (I'm not suggesting that you are doing that)
Australia's soon-to-take-effect ban affects nine platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, but not HN. These bans often operate on the amount of users a platform has, so HN is unlikely to make the cut. Nobody cares about this site.
I'd gladly give up HN if it means Instagram and Facebook are eradicated. Yes, yes, "those that would trade liberty for security...", but we were better off without any form of social media at all.
I often wonder if posts like this, along with the people who want to ban all cars, etc are just rage bait. Fortunately most of the population disagrees with your preferences. I give “general social media ban” around a 1% chance of success.
The problem is not social media, it's the few people controlling it. There is no inherent problem in social media, there's an inherent problem of people caring about only their money and power and not giving a jack shit about anything else.
It sounds extreme, but I support banning usage of anything that runs software for children under 13. Under 13, children are still developing their minds, it is important for their welfare that they learn how to function without technological dependencies.
You know how in school they used to tell us we can't use calculators to solve math problems? Same thing. It can't be done by individual parents either, because then kids would get envious and that in itself would cause more problems than it would solve.
It is important for kids to get bored, to socialize in person, to solve problems the hard way, and develop the mental-muscles they need to not only function, but to make best use of modern technology.
It is also important that parents don't use technology to raise their children (includes TV). Most parents just give their kids a tablet with youtube these days.
This is very extreme take. I learned to program at age 10. It is an amazing tool for mind development. Had to invent sine and cosine tables to make my computer games, before even encountering the concept at school.
Is that survivor's bias? there are many other mental development goals chidren should have. for the very small number of children that will learn to program at that age, there is no harm in delaying it a few years, but for the vast majority whose development would be stunted, or worse, they'll be harmed.
Some kids learn to drink and smoke at a that age too, and many turn out ok.
Kids who drink qt an earlier age respect it more. Americans waiting until 21 ends up in binge drink / problem drinking. Social media is going to be the same.
No they don't, that's a lie adults tell themselves. Many adult alcoholics started drinking as children. People who "respect it more" tend to also be alcoholics. Very few people who start drinking as children abstain as adults.
Keep in mind that alcohol is also a carcinogen. Similar to cigarettes, even one drink shouldn't be tolerated. Even if a certain amount will have no ill effects on average, impacts on individuals depends on individual factors, so one harmless drink for you might be one deadly drink for someone else. It is poison.
That said, I don't judge anyone who uses substances. But there is no tolerable threshold to giving children poison.
same and about the same age. however, completely different times. I thought about this a lot and have safely concluded that if I was 9-10 years old now programming would quickly turn into gaming and doom scrolling and … given a choice now of not being exposed to it at same age or nothing until say HS I would choose the latter
Speaking as someone in their 20s - no, I don't think it's a "completely different time". Just 10 years ago, I first learned programming from scripting languages; SourcePawn from Team Fortress 2, and Lua from Roblox/GMod. Predators, hive minds, and self-destructing behavior from children wasn't suddenly invented or rejuvenated after 2016.
All 3 were a total hotbed of bad influences for a child: Team Fortress had trade pub servers with people doing sprays of literal CP and wearing custom lewd skins to harass users with them - and people with very questionable social skills and intentions huddled up in realtime microphone comms with children, Roblox's predator problem for the last 14+ years (at least that I can attest) is suddenly en vogue now that they're a public company and there's stock shorting to be had, GMod is still the community with the most colorful vocabulary I've ever encountered - plus grooming. And much more.
Indeed, you can (and I did) get burned by these actualities when exposed to such communities in your youth - and it can cost you real money, real time, real idealism/innocence, and real mental health. However, I think being exposed to softwares, systems and games that inspired curiosity and led me toward a path of WANTING to contribute brought me to this software development career and life path, and it would have been much more inaccessible and unknown to me in any other way. And I favorited a comment from another HN user a few days ago that goes in astute depth on why that path can only be organically introduced and self-governed [1].
I referred to these places earlier in my comment as "bad influences". I think the single-most powerful thing a parent can do tasked with this dilemma - especially during an upbringing in systemically hard, uncertain, and turbulent times - is teaching them how to identify, avoid, and confront bad influences. Equipped with that, and knowing how to handle yourself, is of utmost importance.
I agree. my argument is that the benefits of learning from youtube or computers in general is overshadowed by their harm for children undergoing development. Once a person is more or less developed, they can tackle riskier learning sources.
> anything that runs software for children under 13
This is perhaps one of the most bizarre opinions I have ever read. This would bar under 13s from using everything from vending machines to modern fridges. What would you consider "using"? Would under 13s be blocked from riding in any car with "smart" features?
This is a perfect example of the kind of nonsensical totalitarian extremism you see on here that people only espouse because they believe it would never affect them. It goes completely against the Hacker ethos.
Would it have made a big difference if you learned to code at 13? Is there a pressing need as to why kids need to code at a young age? Maybe there could be exceptions for children that develop sooner? If your other developmental metrics were met early on, I don't see why an earlier age would be a problem.
I don't know, maybe? Maybe it's not up to the state to decide whether my kids developmental metrics allows them screen time before age 13? What kind of nanny state is that?
I don't think that's a nanny state. you can't give your kid alcohol for example at that age, let them drive, get married (don't get me started on some countries!), operate a chainsaw or other dangerous machinery.
This is a danger to their mental development. Look at teacher forums all over. r/Teachers on reddit should be illuminating. Tech and parents sticking devices to their kids instead of raising them properly has resulted in utter disaster. If there was no harm imposed on children, I would agree that it is a nanny-state thing.
My kids (6 and 8) are pretty well raised I'd say, but they do have access to a Playstation and a PC, with clear rules and time limits for use. They are good at making friends and don't do trouble in school, and they also have healthy interests other than playing video games. This is because we actively raise them so they can learn to adjust their needs and interact with others, not because we limit their screen time. The problem today is that many parents seemingly does not raise their kids well, maybe because they don't spend enough time together, perhaps because the parents themselves spend their time scrolling reels.
I myself grew up with a desktop computer from around age 7 and it shaped me early on in a positive way to be curious. Computers were also a central part of my social life. There are many positive things that kids can get out of computers, so I find the comparison with alcohol to be hyperbolic.
I don't buy that, Europe has a terrible problem with alcohol, and smoking. In the US both have gone down dramatically in the past two decades. The areas with heavy drinking tolerate giving kids alcohol like eggnog on Christmas.
That type of nanny state is a literal nanny state, imposing rules for children, like an actual nanny.
The usual figurative nanny state refers to a situation in which unreasonable rules and regulations are imposed on the behavior of grownups, not children.
> Would it have made a big difference if you learned X at 13?
Yes. Kids getting access to knowledge that clicks with them earlier than later makes a huge difference.
Which is exactly why so many people are rushing in to control what kids get exposed to. You seem to have pretty strong thought on the issue yourself, if you agree on the possible negative impact, you can't also deny the possibility of positive impact.
The dose makes the poison, I think we can understand how extreme position tend to bring more negative than positive consequences, regardless of the rethoric.
I generally agree. But so much software today is useless without a network connection. Online help (anybody remember those chm files?) was often very very good, because it was supposed to be _the_ documentation for most software.
I think a better distinction is internet enabled software.
I had a good time programming BASIC on my V-Tech pseudocomputer, at age 9. But that's a world away from tiktok, reels and the predatory surveillance economy.
I think my proposal is easier for parents to enforce, and programming can wait. matter of fact, programming isn't a special skill to learn.
You can teach kids electronics, have them construct toys that work on batteries,etc... work on components that don't require programming. teach them algorithms, math, crypto,etc.. without using computers.
If you're teaching kids how to code, you should give them the skills that will help them learn _what_ to code first?
I don't know much about the Amish, so I can't comment.
Teaching kids how to code isn't all that meaningful on its own. knowing what to do once you learn how to code is. If your plan is to teach your kid how to code, teach them to solve problems without code at that age. Unless you're serious about thinking learning at age 5 vs age 13 would make a big difference.
I think every kid 13 and above should have an rpi too.
I think you're missing the point. 5 year old me was writing their own computer games and at no point did I need or ask my parents how to do it (though they did buy the computer; thanks mum and dad!), they didn't know.
There were a plethora of books in the library on how to program, and here you are suggesting I, and everyone like me, be banned from doing so. You'd probably also ban me from the library by assuming I couldn't read aged 5. I certainly could, especially computer manuals. The computer was an amazing thing which did exactly what I told it, and I learned quickly how precise I needed to tell it, and when I made a mistake, it repeated my mistakes over and over without noticing. I learned more about digital ethics age 5 trying to write games than the typical CEO learns going on a "Do Not Create The Torment Nexus" course.
You'd insist I not be allowed to even use software, let alone write my own. You'd be actively cutting off my future professional life, and depriving entire nations of bedroom programmers cum professional software engineers, with your ill-thought-out ban.
If your children show an aptitude or a fascination for a topic, I hope you feed that and praise them for it.
I think books are great, provided they're age appropriate.
First, my proposal is a delay, not a ban. This is such a good idea, that a lot of FAANG CEO's are doing this for their kids welfare (more or less) already.
I think the overall welfare of kids should be weighed against the benefits.
I think you should have been learning to tinker with electronics, solve math algorithms and develop all kinds of curiosities. the future of being a programmer involves competing with LLMs, you have to be good at knowing what to program. Humans aren't needed when it comes to simply knowing how to write code.
I acknowledge that there will be exceptions, and perhaps that should be considered. but also lookup terms like "ipad babies" and how gen-alpha is turning out. Most parents don't teach their kids how to code in basic. and content regulation for kids is futile, unless you want the government monitoring your devices "for the children's sake".
> If your children show an aptitude or a fascination for a topic, I hope you feed that and praise them for it.
Same, but I hope you let them learn things in the right order and consider their overall long term wellbeing instead of temporary satisfaction. Children did fine without computers for all of humanity's history. the nature of children hasn't changed in the past 3 decades. What you consider feeding might actually be stagnating. If there is a good and practical way to make sure that children are developed well enough to interact with computers, and we can also make sure that the content they consume is age-appropriate without implementing a dystopian surveillance state, i'm all for it.
But pretending the problem doesn't exist, and letting 99% of children suffer because 1% of kids might learn BASIC doesn't sound like a good plan.
Problem solving does that, the coding part is just a means to that end. Learning a programming language is similar to learning a human language except much less complex. Solving problems with code helps with brain development, as does solving problems without code.
Coding is just more rewarding, it is important to learn how to solve problems with less rewarding systems. Would you have wanted to solve algebra problems on paper if you knew python? You don't need to solve those problems on paper, but it is good for brain development. Even better than coding for example. Keep in mind that a child's attention window is limited, this is very much a zero sum situation.
Do fulcrums even exist, as independent physical objects? What you say about them not being addictive tempts me to do an entire packet of fulcrums, but I don't know where I could buy any or what they'd look like.
I started learning how to use a computer at the age of 10. This is my career today and has been my hobby for the last 35 years. Learning how to use a computer is like learning math, it needs to happen early.
This ban (or attempt to regulate), similar to Australia's, is at least 10-15 years too late to be honest. It likely would have stopped or lessened the negative impact of FB (and its ilk, but mostly FB, tbh) on much of the society.
Now we know, of course, and everything in hindsight is 20/20.
It's STILL worth trying to regulate social media, now emboldened and firmly established as a rite of passage among youth, adults, and older generations.
Basically, when network connectivity increases, the "bad" nodes can overwhelm the "good" nodes. The other ideas discussed are really interesting; well worth watching.
I'm curious as to how social media gets defined for these bans.
I presume text messaging doesn't count whereas Discord/WhatsApp do? What about Minecraft and other games? What about school platforms which they can post comments/messages on? Is watching YouTube included? When I've filled in surveys about our children's social media use, they have included YouTube, which makes it look like every child is on social media.
It does not really require a lot of nuance. Any platforms serving short-form content using algorithmic recommendations, giving any random account infinite reach, a la Instagram/Tiktok/Youtube/Shorts/Reels/Redbook/etc are part of the problem.
WhatsApp groups are a source of slightly different issues - fake news, radicalization, social bubbles - but not a source of addiction to the same level, especially among the young.
Why don't governments start at the source instead of at the access?
I always have questions that go a bit deeper but maybe because I think differently. I understand it can trample on rights, but I guess I like to still ask and have the thought experiment anyway.
If things like this are so harmful, and it's recognized why is it okay for a parent to give their child access to it in the first place?
Why do kids get to control what they have access to just because parents don't want to parent well, and because they think it'll be a death sentence for their kids social groups? Is it feasible to police parents in that way? Would we even want that?
Think of it similar to alcohol laws. E.g. in the US you don't just want kids to be unable to buy alcohol when their parent is present, you want the point of access to participate in that restriction or it won't work in practice because getting 100% of kids to have good judgement all of the time (or watching them constantly for their whole life) is not realistic. At the same time, many states still have laws allowing alcohol consumption by minors in the presence of their parent because it's really hard to get everyone to agree on a universal binary cutoff with no exception.
In practice, the law does help greatly in spite of not being a mathematical proof the minor will no longer get alcohol because of "parenting well" alone and almost all parents are fine with the restrictions, even in places without the flexibility, because they've come to see and agree with the level of harm over the years. Ie. there is a point enough parents agree strongly enough that the common good of children is accepted over the rights of a parent to decide their child's welfare - it's just usually a hogh bar (e.g. how far punishment can go before it turns into abuse, as another example).
The one thing I don't see and always wonder about with these sorts of things is how they define "social media". Seems like a tough thing to do - if you cast too broad a definition you'll end up with just about anywhere one can communicate on the internet, including email. If you take the very narrow approach of naming FB, IG, TikTok, etc., you almost certainly miss out on whatever the next platform is that's relevant to kids.
Remember YikYak? IIRC that was worse for kids than most of the big social media sites, but how do you write a law that anticipates the next YikYak without banning everything?
I don't think it really matters if the definition is too narrow as long as you ward off the worst threats. An easier way to classify them would be by size: any social network with over 1000 users should have to regulate their users. So as soon as something starts being relevant from a public safety perspective it'll fall under the law.
I am a dissenter. A ban for children is onerous and how can it be enforced? Who will be punished for infractions?
Better a legal code of conduct for platforms that want to raise revenue in your jurisdiction (the important ones, that the state has leverage over). The code should do two things:
1. Prohibit the targeting of individuals below 21
2. Mandate moderation of spaces where young people gather, with resources to enforce it
A ban is much more satisfying to the do goobers and much worse for those it is supposed to protect
> The move would give some parents — after a specific assessment — the right to let their children access social media from age 13. It wasn’t immediately clear how such a ban would be enforced: Many tech platforms already restrict pre-teens from signing up. Officials and experts say such restrictions don’t always work.
This makes it almost sound like a no-op once enough children convince their parents to give exemptions. Hopefully it works out better than that.
>Denmark's government aims to alienate hundreds of thousands of citizens
And people wonder why governments fail. Every time you carve out exceptions you are hollowing out the foundation of your government.
Children of the elite' access to social media will remain of course, can't hollow out your true foundation
my kid and me when I was a kid and my Mom and Dad when they were kids have been creators. you don’t need a fucking phone or “social” media to be a creator, what nonsense!
The problem is not "social media", that's just an insanely broad and poorly category. HN is probably "social media". Many games are probably "social media".
The problem is that certain platforms exploit people for profit by feeding them crap, from political propaganda to ads for weight loss drugs. Many of them are designed to be addictive so folks can keep up "engagement". Enough eyeballs make all crap profitable, or something like that.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are tons of great platforms that young people can benefit from, and vice versa. Including HN. Many subreddits. Tons of forums. Loads online games.
Ban the exploitation. Ban the propaganda. Ban the abuse. But don't ban young people.
That's probably the solution: You can run a social media, but you have to do it ad free. Charge people if you need to, but you cannot run ads. What fucks up social media is the constant need to "engagement".
this is a familiar discourse. Ads are more than a thing you "run," they're an idea. You can't destroy the idea of ads. "Ad free" isn't possible to guarantee. Does this make sense?
I don't know if that can be implemented, but to me it seems the main problem is the algorithmic feed. I think I would be okay with kids having access to social media, but only if they can't get personalized feed, but can see their friends and maybe specific topics.
Laws don't require foundation let alone scientific evidence. If either were the case laws would rarely be passed. For Denmark I'd assume it's just vibes among the law makers social class. They have a worldview and by God they will impose it.
Germanys ID has the technical means to allow something like that (age verification without disclosing identity), but knowing the German Gov and their absolute stasis something like this will never happen. It is absolutely necessary to do something like this, because social media has a net negative influence on society.
A lot of kids in my daughters class (~7yo's) are consuming brain rot content already. They shout "SIGMA BOY" or "SKIBIDI TOILET" like little retards during lessons. Yeah memes are cool and all, but not at this age.
You usually apply bans like this to something that is unhealthy for _everyone_ e.g. smoking. So why isn't the focus on regulating social media to be better? It seems like it's not great for the whole population in its current form.
Generally those don't have population wide, negative impacts (except maybe drinking). I would compare it more to smoking which is considered a public health issue and we regulated smoking out of the market through a combination of safety regulations, limitations on marketing etc. Age bans were part of that but the ID checking requirements there were substantially less risky due to little no risks of retention.
Your initial comment may not have been well stated.
It asserts that underage bans are usually applied to things that are unhealthy for all.
You follow that by stating that provided examples of underage bans are things that are not things with negative impacts on populations.
I'd suggest that real world examples exist of adolecsent alcohol induced brain damage, drivers 10-16 having higher rates of accidents causing death and injury, child soldiers having a negative impact on society, industrial scale under age sex in Christian Brother homes having bad outcomes, early exposure to excessive porn being cited as causing brain rot and social malfunction, etc.
As for:
> we regulated smoking out of the market through a combination of safety regulations, limitations on marketing etc.
I'd point to Australia that started down that path with good results, and continued further only to regulate tobacco out of "regular" markets into the embrace of black markets that come with worse problems than the older established markets that "had a code" (established criminals rarely went after family or indiscriminately acted such that bystanders were killed or injured).
You raise interesting questions that deserve deeper thought and consideration.
Let‘s ban social media altogether. In twenty years from now we will have found out that social media is more harmful than tobacco and alcohol combined.
i am thankfull for cellphoneless childhood. Wishing same thing upon my children. Worst thing about all of this is the peer pressure, if all your friends have a phone then you become an outcast, so it is a team effort from all parents.
A reason to be cautious about propositions like these isn't just the inherent belittling of children's right to information, which can be argued for or against in certain cases, but the aspect of giving any proceeding government the ability to ban a form of media from children due to their perception of toxicity, derangement, danger, et cetera.
The inherent belittling of children's right to the enjoyment of alcoholic drinks... Our current form of social media is a drug and it harms our children in all ways and adults too btw.
I don't buy it. The most relevant critique is see is that it's hard to control the age of your users without removing anonymous accounts thus limiting privacy.
Well, it's a hard problem but it doesn't feel impossible to solve.
To me there is no question that children should grow up protected from harmful substances. You don't want kids to smoke, scrolling algo feeds is not better. There is enough interesting internet out there without social media!
You're right, I didn't produce evidence in my comment. Smoking and lung cancer are more clear cut than social media problems in general.
The effects of social media are more complex and nuanced than smoking. There are a lot of studies that show that social media has a negative effect on mental well being. When someones dies of loneliness or birth rates collapse and young people have less sex than ever, social media is never the only cause and might not even be the main reason, but it seems to play an important role.
Also, I don't think all social media is bad. I do love these discussions on HN even or especially when we don't agree, but tiktok and similar services have a lot of bad incentives with regards to user well being.
It's not entirely honest that we argue about 'times the teenager has sex decreasing' and 'collapsing birth rates' being a problem when most parents and society itself heavily discourage their teenagers having sex and/or creating offspring.
Also, I'm not arguing in favour of Social Media here. I just have seen enough moral panics in my years to have become allergic to them. For instance, I'm still waiting for evidence that computer games increase violence in real life, and how comics rot kids' brains.
Strong arguments demand strong empirical evidence. "Well-being" is not, in fact, a good metric (unless we apply it to other aspects of modern life). In fact, the very idea that wellbeing should be a concern in policy is dystopic: Remember that one of the reasons books are banned in "Fahrenheit 451" is that they made readers unhappy.
The teenage sex complaint is coming from socially conservative people, the ones that also simultaneously create as punishing conditions for young single moms and blame them for host of social issues. They are not complaining that teenagers are not being pregnant enough.
They are complaining that young males are not having easy one night stands. They also dont like that girls are empowered to say no. In their minds, the dynamic is all wrong when a young man is not complete pressuring jerk and she can say no.
They dont care about underclass of 16 years old with a life destroyed and a baby.
As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15 (or some other number, higher or lower I don't care). I'm pretty sure they're worse than cigarettes for the future of humanity.
Agreed. Teachers are seeing the massive benefits from banning phones entirely during school hours. I think once we get data from bans for certain things like social media for kids, we'll all want to get on the wave.
Once the data is in bosses will see the massive benefits and ban mobile phones entirely during work hours.
Good.
I recall "no personal calls" at work as a rule, in the old days. Inbound emergencies allowed, of course.
Why do people think looking at their personal email, or looking at their phone is acceptable at work?
It's no different than sitting, reading a magazine pre-Internet. The very idea would have been absurd.
> It's no different than sitting, reading a magazine pre-Internet. The very idea would have been absurd
Breaks improve employee health and reduces burnout. Not taking breaks harms performance.
Work breaks are also required by law in many states.
Really hope this is sarcasm..
Or do you also feel the same about the 6x14 hour workdays?
Why do you care?
Basic human decency says your workplace environment should be chill enough to let you take breaks as you, yourself, dictate. If you're underperforming because of it, you're fired. Enforcing a rule as you claim strips the employee of what little respect they have left. To be honest, your suggestion is sickening to me.
This is part of the K-shaped economy.
Highly skilled jobs can absolutely be 'perform or be fired', because you're paying for a person's ability to do a specialized thing, and there's usually only so much specialized work to be done.
But there are also a lot of 'we need bodies at a low cost' jobs.
And those latter jobs run on work_output : labor_cost, which can always be maximized by making fewer workers do more.
(Consequently, why the real goal for people studying / graduating in the modern economy should be to find a way to get into the former jobs...)
Yes, and this dichotomy has been analyzed by political and economic theorists for centuries and everyone except autocrats and slave owners has agreed that the conditions surrounding the "work_output : labor_cost" jobs you describe are a huge miscarriage of justice and ought to be discarded with the past. Whether that is predicted to occur via bloody revolution or capitalist accelerationism is a matter of your particular economic and philosophical taste. But every ethical human being says we shouldn't treat people like that.
Not treating people like that requires a fundamental move away from capitalist primacy in the US.
You're barking up the wrong tree if you're expecting it to be corporation-initiated.
This sort of work culture ruined the world way more than social media ever did.
> It's no different than sitting
I'm curious, do supermarket cashiers where you live stand or sit? Why/why not?
The job of pick items up from a belt, finding the barcode, moving that across the scanner until there's a beep, and then putting it on the "out" belt, really does not require the employee to be standing for it.
So why then, are they standing? Because merely sitting looks lazy and unprofessional? Sure if it's a 20 year old they have the energy, but if the employee is 64 about to retire? Making them stand for an entire 8 hour shift, I mean, that's how it is, but it doesn't seem cruel to you when the job doesn't require it and isn't affected by giving the 64 year old employee a stool to sit on until she retires?
I am looking for data regarding this, do you have references? I need to convince my school ;)
This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
> This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand that their children have smartphones at school).
> Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
> And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
I think there is a difference though. There is the "off my lawn" crowd of "children today are so bad because..." sure, but I think they are not the ones demanding social media bans. The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
> So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
Some students even wish for a ban to reduce the pressure to keep up with social media.
That reminded me of Warren Buffet asking for his kind and to be taxed more.
By "his kind" you mean human beings?
Just the fuck you rich, I'm buying a football team for a laugh human beings. Not that Warren would necessarily buy a football team for laugh, but that "kind".
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The issue isn't that billionaires aren't human, the problem very much is that billionaires are regular petty spiteful human beings with poor judgement, impulse control, odd beliefs and an the utter lack of checks and balances that can be disregarded when a human has a billion and more.
NotAllBillionaires, sure .. but it only takes a few to screw over millions of other humans on a whim.
I agree with you.
Frankly, imho, billionaires shouldn't even exist. No one person can get that much wealth, that much power, that much influence, without losing their humanity, their decency. It's just not possible because the only way to accrue that much wealth is to do horrifically indecent things.
So, do I recognize what you're saying? Certainly. But I won't be shedding a tear of sympathy for them. I lose all sympathy for them when they step on the necks of everyday people to get where they are.
Is building a successful business automatically horribly indecent?
What about winning the powerball?
If you had to choose the least horrible billionaire you can think of, what horrifically indecent things have they done to acquire that wealth?
If you are a terrible being, yes.
Succeeding at business does not alone make you a billionaire; that's a whole new level above "successful business owner". Most successful business owners are millionaires but not billionaires. As I said, no one becomes a billionaire without doing horrible things because said horrible things are exactly how you amass such a large amount of wealth amongst a single person.
Also, winning the lottery to the extent of becoming a billionaire is neither common (that's the understatement of the millennium) nor a business. It is a gamble, and a gamble millions of people lose every day because they refuse or fail to understand the sheer improbability of "getting the big one" and the sheer degree to which said gambles are stacked against the "player".
> As I said, no one becomes a billionaire without doing horrible things because said horrible things are exactly how you amass such a large amount of wealth amongst a single person.
Not exactly true.
Andrew Forrest became a billionaire via Fortescue Metals and leveraging development of vast iron ore fields for sale to China. Since then he's focused on renewable energy to reduce harmful emissions in resource mining. He has skated some questionable activities in a humane and considered way but he's far from scum of the earth.
Gina Rinehart became a billionaire by virtue of being born to a self made billionaire. Her father got there by mining Blue Asbestos and exporting lung disease across the planet, followed up by also exploiting iron ore fields (although decades prior to Forrest). Lang Hancock (the father of Rinehardt) was a person of questionable values, Gina is a terrible human being with scany regard for others.
The same Andrew Forrest whose company were found to have knowingly destroyed hundreds of local Australian aboriginal sacred sites in its mining operations? Also, he's a billionaire. He may not be "scum of the earth", and maybe he's tried to do better in his latter days, but he still got horrifically rich off of everyday workers' sweat, injuries, and hardships (mining is no joke).
Besides, this philanthropy is largely just token restitution, at best. No one needs to be that wealthy to live more than comfortable. If he really wanted to help the world, he would use enough of his wealth so as to no longer be a billionaire.
People vastly underestimate just how much a billion dollars is compared to a million dollars, or even 500 million dollars. He could literally give away 99% of his wealth and still "only" have 10 million dollars. And as of of 2023 he had 33 times that much.
No one needs to hog that much of the world's resources. It is neither just nor equitable.
That's the one, and there's the rub.
Are you comfortable blaming individuals like Forrest for the destruction that global consumption of iron, copper, and renewables brings, or would you rather 'fess up to collective responsiblity?
The largest Copper resource in the US currently is on naive American sacred land, and the latest proposal for providing rare earth elements essntial for modern lifestyles would disrupt a river system that spans a land area similar in size to Texas.
Do you wish to blame Forrest for these things, or the end customers and their demands?
NB: I've things to attend to now, I'll be back in some hours if you've an interest in all this.
I would rather blame both.
It is our collective society's fault, yes, but the billionaires are the ones who exploit it. They are just as bad, if not worse.
Also, apologies, but I edited my above comment, and wasn't able to submit it before you replied.
And no worries. Good luck on your things. Honestly, I'm kinda done with this conversation, as interesting as it has been. It feels like it's run its course.
In any case, I hope you have a good day!
It's a pity you bailed, no drama - it's an area of long term interest to me and from the look of your comment you've never worked in mining, you've assumed Forrest never has, nor worked the land, and took an ankle deep search for "bad things about Forrest".
The interesting thing about Forrest is he grew up on Aboriginal land side by side with aboriginal people who themselves have deeply divided views about their past and their future - Forrest has gone well out of his way to provide jobs and education for native people and to sit down at length and discuss deeply contentious issues.
In a domain rife with trolley problems he's been considerably better than most, still with unavoidable warts, and hasn't blown up and destroyed anything on the order of that which Rio Tinto and US Gas companies have.
If you lack any on the ground local context and knowledge there's no shartage of bad press about Forrest, he gets no end of it from the likes of Gina Rhinehart, Clive Palmer, and other resource billionaires who despise him for turning much of his wealth to a greater good (an area of debate, of course) and suggesting that others do the same.
For your interest, this is Jill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck
I've known both her and Forrest pretty much my entire life, her land is just to north of where Forrest is operating, she is dealing with many issues - some of which are touched upon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt6Hmp9ndkI
( Mainly about Canada, but comes back to touch upon Jill's 50,000 year strong family art collection )
> It is our collective society's fault, yes, but the billionaires are the ones who exploit it.
I'd be interested in your suggestions for how to do better.
Bear in mind that if individual billionaires were not operating here then the demand for resources would still exist and would be met by corporations (eg: Rio Tinto) who would chew through the landscape just as you claim others do: https://antar.org.au/issues/cultural-heritage/the-destructio...
I mean Masa will make you a billionaire if you just have a shit business idea you’re enthusiastic enough about, no need to be a terrible person.
Compared to the amount of billionaires there are also relatively many lottery jackpots that will get you there if you just stick your winnings in an index fund.
Not to mention that there’s a decent amount of people who become billionaires by just working on relatively boring ”normal” business like real estate development, where some luck, good decisions and leveraging bank loans will get you there without having to be a slumlord or doing anything terrible.
> The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
Do the stats prove that cell phones are the cause of the dire mental health indicators? Or at least that there is a correlation?
"but this time it's different" has also been a universal historical argument
>The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture.
Honestly you could just cut and paste the same arguments about jazz music in the 1920s or rock music in the later 20th century and they'd be indistinguishable. Just replace the mentions of jazz with social media topics and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether it was an article today or 100 years ago. "Health professionals" wringing hands about social media and jazz music in hilariously similar terms a century apart to a bunch of old people who are convinced the kids these days are going to shit because of the things they like to pay attention to.
https://daily.jstor.org/when-jazz-was-a-public-health-crisis...
Young people ARE SUPPOSED TO make poor decisions and be stressed out about it.
Middle aged people are supposed to clutch their pearls and wail about how this time it's different and truly awful (but what we did as kids was reasonable)
But all the middle aged people are wasting their lives on the junk information addiction train as well. It's not some generational divide.
It's like a parent telling their kid not smoke, while they are still addicted and smoking in the garden themselves.
Making bad decisions is only a net benefit if they can recover from them in time. Then it becomes a lesson and not an anchor. With addictive behaviors like drugs, nicotine included… making the early mistake ends up being a permanent mistake.
Lots of bending over backwards and appeals to authority to rationalize an emotional feeling of "This time is different."
Again, every generation thinks that.
This time might be different. But it's probably not.
> Again, every generation thinks that.
> This time might be different. But it's probably not.
And this is an appeal to tradition.
This article[1] from 2024 discusses this the studies on this topic. It seems to me the results are mixed, but conclusions range between social media being neutral to harmful. There is a lot in that article, so it's worth a read.
[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/728739
When appealing to the authority of academic studies, it's very important to be aware of the replication crisis for studies in the field of Psychology specifically, which is one of the worst offenders. Reproducibility has been found to be as low as 36% [1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project
That was not an appeal to the authority of academic papers so much as the OP trying to give context for the information that has informed their position.
Your responses have been an appeal to tradition (“every generation thinks that”), and a dismissal of the information because of the reproducibility crisis.
Ie you are arguing that we (humans) struggle with discerning Truth, and therefore we are wrong, and everything is fine.
But taking the negative position is just as epistemologically flawed. Hence the OPs attempt to discuss the best data we can find.
Letting people figure out cigarettes were bad for them took a very long time, and if social media is another form of addiction why not treat it how we treat other addictive products?
We could assume that this time is different and people, well children and minors specifically, will learn to avoid the addiction rather than banning them like alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.
This time might be different. But it's probably not.
Books, for instance. Some people will read for five hours without pausing, and they can use three or four books every week.
What is your point? I'm afraid I missed the point of your statement.
There was a - very similar - moral panic in the 1700s about young people 'reading excessively', which was blamed for escapism, unhappiness[1] and even increases in suicide rates (see: Werther Effect). The language used was 'reading addiction' - much like todays 'smartphone addiction' or, more modern, AI-related 'illnesses'.
Today, the panic is that kids read too little, or the wrong stuff.
What is and isn't societally desirable changes. The tactic to ban the currently undesirable behaviour persists. Moral panics tell us more about generational dynamics and power structures than the medium itself..
[1] https://www.historytoday.com/archive/medias-first-moral-pani...
What about the health and wellbeing of individuals?
Were there well studied negative health impacts from reading excessively during this very similar scenario?
I'm not a historian so I'm curious to see the parallels because right now it looks like we're talking about two completely different things.
Increased suicide rates were being discussed, and there were doctors claiming they had empirical evidence (worse eyesight, loss of sense of reality, 'melancholy' (aka: depression) ...).
Of course, that was 200 years ago, so our standards of 'rigorous empiricism' can hardly be compared to what they had. But the patterns still are eerily similar.
Also, note how modern diagnostics not only concern the well-being of the media-consuming/delusional individual, but also their environment. Polemically speaking: You can be perfectly happy being weird, if your environment feels negatively affected by you, you technically still are a psychiatrical case and need 'fixing' according to the DSM.
Hell is other people, only the young can defend themselves and their interests less and are easier being picked on.
Just nitpicking your first sentence: prohibition broadly works, just in the US (at least) it breeds negative externalities that don't seem worth it in balance.
> prohibition breeds desire
Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever.
My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
Me: "Umm. You'll find out. When you get to it."
It's not that hard to drive a car! Unfortunately, physics motivates us to have unreasonable expectations of our drivers, like "doesn't drive off the road at 100km/h ever", and "avoids all obstacles all of the time". That's the hard part.
>My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard and if you have the attitude that things aren't hard that tends to be true. Don't set your kid up for failure.
> I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard [..]
I would hazard a guess you didn't meet that many other drivers on the farm (!)
> Don't set your kid up for failure
I'm doing my damndest not to ... but you have no idea ;)
Driving on the farm is actually a lot different, you usually have no more than one or two other drivers, but there's no rules. You have to know where everybody is, know what they intend to do, and know whether or not they know where you are and if they can see you.
it makes people much better and more patient drivers because you can't just rely on traffic laws you have to know the intention of somebody in a piece of machinery and if they plan to back up or where they're going and what's in their head... and how to communicate with hands or a yell
Many countries have the driving license at 16. In France it’s accompanied by a parent; in USA it’s the full driving license (I’ve learnt at 13 and never had an accident for 30 years). 16 is ok if you withstand peer pressure.
Insurance and actuarial science is some of the most data-drivenwork we have. It is incredibly hard to withstand peer pressure and there is not much wrong in admitting what the data has already proven.
It doesn't look to be that hard to be a dentist.
You drill a dark spot on tooth and put some resin inside to fill it up. /s
Teachers are not good indicators of measuring 'benefits', as they are both the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body, they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be, and they are also grading the success - which all too often comes down to compliance.
That's why if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are diametral or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test. If control group with smartphones gets consistently less points by graders who do not know them or their smartphone habits as compared to those who live in digital exile, we can talk. Until then, 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study. For me, that's an indication that the outrage is pearl-clutching.
How do you a double blind sutdy on smartphones? It seems to me that the group that would get smartphone would understand they’re the smartphone group, and the one without would know they don’t have one.
Neither the test group nor the control group does have to know they are part of an experiment.
That's not how double blind studies work.
You misunderstood my point.
I didn't claim the participants wouldn't know whether they own a phone - obviously they would. I said they wouldn’t know they’re in a study whose purpose is to correlate smartphone use with academic performance.
That's perfectly compatible with a double-blind setup:
* the *students* just think they’re taking standardized tests, not that the effects of their smartphone habits are being monitored;
* the *graders* don’t know whose tests belong to whom.
That’s about as "double blind" as social-science research gets. The commenter I replied to latched onto the literal impossibility of hiding the phone itself, not the intentional design of the experiment.
Ok. My understanding of double blind studies is that they involve a placebo. I don't really want to argue about social science experiments.
> they are... the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body
> 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
To clarify, do you think that phones or the removal of phones leads to these outcomes? Do you think that teachers like or dislike phones? Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?
> they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be
Some do. Are teachers the only ones?
> if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are [detrimental] or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test.... Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study.
I am not sure how you would set this up in a way that does not fall victim to a dozen confounding variables. There have been comparisons of standardized tests before and after phone bans, of course, but those also fall victim to similar statistical issues.
> Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?
My point is that if you ask wagonmakers what they think about cars, you won't get many positive replies, but enthsiastic ones where city governments decide to go full Amish. New times and new technology necessitate changing the craft, and the methods of yesteryear, though trained into teachers, just don't work anymore. Change is scary.
You also can't have double-blind study on something both the participant and teacher know is present or not.... But that doesn't mean the study is invalid, it just means you have to account for it.
That’s interesting, what if they don’t know it is an experiment or that any study is being done?
School A bans them, school B does not. None of the teachers know a study is being done.
I did close to the same with my kids.. their PCs were in a common room, they got their first phone at 14 and it stayed at the downstairs charging station at night until 17. IMO it worked great and both our kids have a healthy relationship with their phones and tech in general.
I got my first smartphone at 23 (an HTC touch) and have an unhealthy relationship with my phone ;)
You’re lucky. Some kids do prefer the real world.
When I say they have a "healthy relationship with tech" it doesn't mean they don't use tech, they both are heavily into tech, but don't let it impact their life adversely. It is more a balance that works for that individual than a preference for real vs. tech.
I'm not sure how I feel about making it illegal, but it does benefit from some sort of collective action.
If none of your child's friends and classmates have cell phones yet, I'd strongly encourage establishing a smartphone pact with the other parents. Our community used http://waituntil8th.org pledges but even a shared spreadsheet would work.
One of the things that seems necessary is to make it illegal for a kid to use a phone in class before a certain age.
If you don't have that you get the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards.
> the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards
True, but that's why you don't do it alone. You need to talk with other parents and encourage them to talk to others until the majority of parents understand the risks and let the administration, school board, and teachers know that they have your support.
All that local level stuff doesn’t work. As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone, the online world becomes vastly more interesting than the day to day.
> All that local level stuff doesn’t work
I can't speak to anyone else, but it seems to be working well enough in our town. The overwhelming majority of kids don't have cell phones until high school. That doesn't mean your kids won't beg you for a smartphone, it just means you can say "no" without socially isolating them.
> As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone
The point is to engage in collective action early enough that you can prevent these situations in the first place. Once a critical mass of kids have smartphones and their socialization and coordination moves to online spaces it becomes intensely isolating to be the only kid in a friend group without a smartphone.
Collective action that is effective is hard to pull off in a million homes a million times around the country. Most people without extra time and resources are just not going to do it which at this point is a large part of the country. It’s like advocating for town level collective action on alcohol or age of consent. It’s way more sensible to just make it law.
> Collective action that is effective is hard to pull off in a million homes a million times around the country.
True, but it is significantly easier for a single motivated individual to pull it off in their own community than for them to change laws at the territory/state or country/federal level.
And even if your end goal is a universal law, it usually makes sense to start at the lowest level from a process perspective. Laws at the community level are often a precursor to laws at the territory/state level, just as territory/state laws can be a precursor to country/federal laws. In the USA, both alcohol and age of consent laws have gone through (and in some respects are still going through) this process. Bypassing this (admittedly slow) laboratory of democracy to implement novel laws directly at the country/federal level results in controversial laws that often have unintended consequences.
> It’s way more sensible to just make it law.
Centralizing laws can be sensible if you're somewhat confident that the people writing and enforcing those laws will behave sensibly.
I fully agree. There should be a complete ban on social media and similar addictive platforms for those under 16, and a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users aged 16 to 18.
We basically give cigarettes to children.
> nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.)
I agree, and this is easy to implement. My kids have to hand over their phones every day before bedtime. I see no need for any institutional interference to implement such trivial policy in any family.
> We basically give cigarettes to children.
In my opinion, this is not a good comparison. Just because parents give their kids smartphones doesn't mean they want or force them to use social networks. Kids use them because it's socially acceptable, and they aren't warned against using them.
When I was a kid, my father sometimes asked me to go to the store to buy cigarettes for him. At that time, this was a socially acceptable thing for a parent to do. However, the problem of kids smoking cigarettes was almost non-existent. This is because every kid was strongly advised that only adults could do this. There would be consequences if you didn't obey this advice. By the way, I never started smoking.
It is absurd to suggest that children should not be allowed to socialize online. Have we completely forgotten the internet we grew up on? I would be dead if I hadn't been able to make friends online.
> addictive platforms
The internet we grew up on does not exist.
Kids socialize in video games now.
When I was a kid I joined a random BBCode forum with a group of 10 people who taught me how to program. There were challenges some passionate person set up and he would give tips to me and a few others for free. We hung out all day. That's gone.
Why not vice tax the operators? Easier than using age verification schemes and giving them even more data, chat control etc. I'm thinking tiktok, meta and x. Want to operate in Denmark? The license will cost $N/person/month where the amount of people equals the country's population. It's basically a viewer tax.
> As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15.
I see no logic in the above statement. You gave your kid a smartphone when she was 14. By today's standards, that's very late, and it's basically just one year before Denmark's proposed ban on social media. You can ban your child from having a smartphone for an arbitrary amount of time, but they are a future adult. Adults use smartphones. You can either prepare your child for the potential negatives of smartphone use, or they will learn that through their own experience later. There's no escaping smartphones and social networks.
The only way to deal with this is to talk to your kids, warn them, and educate them. I gave my kids smartphones when they were 8 and 9 years old. Those phones were fully managed by me, and the only web pages they could access were their school pages and Wikipedia. Every year, I relaxed these restrictions and frequently talked to them about the dangers of social media. Now, they have almost fully unrestricted phones, and I don't think there's anything to worry about.
The problem with social media for kids and teens is constant comparison. Any kind of comparison, but predominantly about visual appearance. Most people will never win this fight, and I believe it is a parent's role to explain this to their children. Banning smartphones or social media won't save anyone from facing the reality later on.
"adults use smartphones"
Is this so?
I think of it like the time when Hong Kong was flooded with Opium.
"adults smoke opium"
If you find that too crass, there are countless other ways to put it:
"adults eat sugar"
"adults watch TV"
Just because everyone in the mainstream does something, DOES NOT mean that this is a good thing or a smart thing to do.
In fact, we can easily observe that the few adults who are at the absolute top of their game, the most skilled, the most wealthy, the most powerful... well guess what? They DO NOT use smartphones. They don't tweet. They don't have profiles anywhere.
Except for GPS directions, there is actually very very little actual need to use a smartphone. At work, you have a computer for access to Google. At home, you have a tablet or TV or books or a Kindle for media consumption.
You can just swipe a credit card for payments.
A smartphone is not at all needed to be a highly functioning adult.
In fact - it actually prevents you from ever unlocking your fullest potential by removing any chance for your brain to ever catch a breath and just be bored for half an hour and hear your own thoughts.
> "adults smoke opium"
That's a bad comparison. The main reason for importing opium to Hong Kong at that time was to use it as a sedative drug. Smartphones, on the other hand, have many legitimate uses for every user. The addiction to social networks is not a primary motivation to sell smartphones.
> A smartphone is not at all needed to be a highly functioning adult.
It depends on your definition of "highly functioning." You probably also don't need a Google account, a tablet, a TV, books, or a Kindle to be a highly functioning adult. I guess I can just go on. Arguing this way is meaningless.
When your kid reports that 90% of the other kids in their classroom already have a smartphone, you either give your kid a smartphone or make them feel like a loser in their social group.
Besides, having a smartphone doesn't mean having access to social networks, the open internet, or the ability to install any application. It's up to parents to properly configure parental controls for the respective age group.
> Except for GPS directions, there is actually very very little actual need to use a smartphone.
It conveniently replaces many things, usually in a more secure way. For example, paying with a phone is more secure than paying with a plastic card. And most importantly, kids listen to music on their smartphones, just as I used a Walkman/Discman in the past.
> In fact, we can easily observe that the few adults who are at the absolute top of their game, the most skilled, the most wealthy, the most powerful... well guess what? They DO NOT use smartphones. They don't tweet. They don't have profiles anywhere.
Terrence Tao regularly posts on Mastodon, and Geoffrey Hinton on X/Twitter. Sam Altman has a huge X presence. Elon Musk, no comment.
Or parents could just take responsibility for their own children and not buy them a phone instead of outsourcing their parental responsibilities to the government.
So no social life for kids then?
It’s not 1995 any more. My 13 year old gets social contact doing things like playing Minecraft with people from school, organised via WhatsApp with group chats and then yelling about diamond swords and lava chickens or whatever.
There’s then the simple reality that most schools require smartphones for things like homework. It’s set on devices you can only access via an app. Ok maybe you could run some form of android emulator and maybe that works and maybe they can’t do the homework on the bus on the way home and instead can just stare out of the window, but then the teachers tell them to do something in class.
Then once they leave home at 18 and get introduced to something which has been banned yet is completely normal, they go overboard anyway.
The opposite. Those children who are barred to own phones are forced to actually seek out an actual social life.
The digital illusion of a "social life" that smartphones create is neither social, nor living.
Those very responsible would likely do that. But then you have a spectrum from "fully responsible but on occasions slip" to "not responsible at all". You can help some make the "good" decision and prevent others from making "bad" decisions. Hopefully those who grew up with healthier environments will have higher chances for becoming "fully responsible".
It amazes me after seeing the corruption of the current government that people want to give it more power over our lives.
My wife and I have this discussion on a regular basis. We want kids, but we've both had to navigate technology usage without any guide, and I've personally experienced how ruinous a smartphone can be.
We want to teach our children how to _responsibly_ use technology. We're still not sure what that looks like in detail, but the general agreement we've come to is something like 'no screens before age X'.
Denmark's government has authoritarian aims and are one of the primary groups pushing chat control in the EU. I think you are falling for the "think of the children..." fallacy here.
This is a stepping stone towards further control elsewhere, especially once a framework for enforcement is in place (which nobody actually thinks about when emotionally reacting to feel-good ideas like this). How easy would it be to expand ID based age enforcement to tracking ALL online activity and cracking down on "non-approved" speech? No thanks. I'll handle parenting myself.
Also, if you don't care about the age number, and think social media is just objectively bad...why are you on this social media site? Isn't posting here the definition of hypocrisy...given you're supporting what you believe to be worse than cigarettes?
I don't think HN is a social media site. The goals of a social media site is to keep you engaged for as long as possible with the assistance of various algorithms, dark patterns while your data is sold to businesses so they can have a slice of your attention pie via ads and supported content.
I dont feel as if any of that applies here. In fact HN has gotten further from a social media site by not displaying comment points.
You can argue this, but if you hand over this authority to government, it will not be up to you.
Fundamentally this is an upvote driven social media platform no different from Reddit, which everyone agrees is social media.
If you live in Denmark, get ready to tie your State ID to your HN profile to login and hope that you don't say anything that would make the wrong official (or your employer) upset with you.
As we know from history, well-intentioned government laws have zero unintended consequences, always work perfectly every time, and are very easy to remove once they've been created...
Happen to be a Dane and I fully agree with your sentiment. I happen to agree (I think) that keeping children away from social media on a large scale, to avoid social isolation for those who might opt out of choice, might be overall good for the children. But the means that will likely be required to do so are, like you say, essentially more steps towards mass surveillance. And like you say, laws that can be exploited so easily by a government in bad faith are so dangerous to allow into public law, even in times when exploitation seems unlikely, because they'll likely never be removed (hah) or even amended before it's too late. Like Chat Control (though it seems pretty clear to _me_ that that is set up for abuse to begin with). I'm so embarrassed we're spearheading that abomination.
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You mean like a continuously changing front page?
"Old media" was (and is) quite heavily regulated. Not everywhere turned into an East German surveillance state.
The idea that governments are incapable of acting in the interests of their citizens is just a narrative designed to weaken public democratic institutions and hand power to the real authoritarians.
Old media the three networks censored so much and the rise of cable allowed a more open playing field where someone could swear or show an HBO gritty cop show that mirrored reality.
The world of variety shows died for a reason.
Whenever a politician wants you to think of the children, you should be alert. What we see Danish politicians push for is the same we see in England. I don't think Danish politicians are acting on their own, it is much more likely that this is a push from EU.
We see similar attacks on personal freedom with the new GDPR updates: https://noyb.eu/en/eu-commission-about-wreck-core-principles...
I would be pretty happy about social media being banned for everyone if not the immense possibilty for the government to abuse this law to disrupt undesired communication altogether.
This website is social media.
Technically true but I've found it to be less addictive than other text forums (like the R-site and Lemmy), let alone the algo-powered video-based abominations that normies are all hooked on.
I'm thinking that it comes down to one thing in particular: the absence of response notifications. There's only so much addiction you can get out of a page of text without so much as a bell icon.
This is true, it's also not devoid of addictiveness :)
But you know what I mean, right? The ones using intricate algorithms and tracking to keep you "engaged" and manipulate what you read and see
I know what you mean, but I think the issue is not social media, but rather big corporations being shitty. PepsiCo makes addictive beverages that cause people develop to diabetes and heart disease, but that doesn't mean beverages should be illegal. I think it would be better to regulate or ban the specifically harmful things, rather than a blanket ban on something that is actually useful. And like you alluded to, banning social media could easily lead to a general crackdown on freedom of expression, journalism, etc, now that it is the primary way people communicate with one another.
I'll also add that I'm not specifically opposed to banning minors from using social media. It would probably also be better if it was illegal for children to buy their own soda tbh.
What exactly do you mean by “social media”?
There are a lot of communities built around things like Discord and Telegram. IRC existed long before these.
There are many websites that allow you to post pictures and have other people comment on them. DeviantArt pre-dates the vast majority of modern apps.
There are also vast numbers of iterations on forums.
At what point should you prevent people from finding and talking to each other?
Crazy to think how less government would need to act like a mom if there were one or two parents out there who were familiar with the word "no."
I, too, was a really great parent before having children.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-goes-viral-for-tweeting-fr...
> Dorothy, who runs an Ariana Grande fan account, was suffering through a typical teenage nightmare: Her mom took away her phone. But the resourceful teen didn't let that stop her from communicating with her followers. First, she started using Twitter on her Nintendo DS, a handheld video game device.
> Sometime after finding her DS, it was taken again, so Dorothy started tweeting from yet another connected device: her fridge. "My mom uses it to google recipes for baking so I just googled Twitter," she told CBS News.
She would make a great entrepreneur one day, if she manages to survive the mental illness that comes with social media.
I doubt this is true. I doubt that the Nintendo (3)DS web browser would be sufficient to post on Twitter, even in 2019.
There was a whole mobile.twitter.com simplified interface for devices like that. Removed in 2020.
Plus this: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Support/Nintendo-3DS-2DS/Usag...
> As of 25 October 2022, it is no longer possible to use Nintendo 3DS Image Share or Wii U Image Share to post images on Facebook and Twitter.
That's... pretty awesome?
And I'm pretty sure she did it just for laughs. I also built a listening device to hear what my mom was saying when I wasn't there. But it was too boring to me to actually listen to the conversations, I don't think I ever actually did it. But I did enjoy immensely setting it up.
That's the hacker spirit!
If you live in isolation, totally! We live in a civilization so we have to coordinate and compromise to get along.
Let's do away with the laws requiring shops to check ID before selling cigarettes. After all, a parent can simply tell their child not to smoke cigarettes and that's clearly good enough, right? All in the name of less government, which is clearly the most important priority here.
That system has massive holes. Using convenience store employees many recent immigrants to be the gatekeeper to cigarettes for your kids seems foolish. Who trusts that last line of defense? If a kid fails at once location another location will succeed and there are no punishment for attempting to purchase underage.
You make a persuasive case, but nicotine is genuinely addictive. Something to do with releasing stored glucose and substituting for food, and causing irritability on what I take to be a physiological level on withdrawal. Otherwise I'd agree.
But in this context, is it so important to distinguish between whether something is physiologically addictive vs. just seriously habit-forming? Except for substances where withdrawal is genuinely life-threatening, the practical difference seems to be in degree, not kind. Nicotine withdrawal causes irritability, but (I know having experienced both) so can breaking a bad social media habit.
(And it seems like there's a physiological basis to both cases, it's just that one involves endogenous chemicals and the other doesn't)
If all the other kids are on social media all the time, it makes it much harder to keep your kids off it. Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online? Would you want that for your kids?
Bans like this make much more sense at a community level. Not an individual level.
The idea that it's "hard" therefore we need government to save us is exactly why the program itself will never work. The problem is much deeper than law or government can fix.
You don’t need the government. Just some form of collective action.
I know of plenty of alternative communities & schools in which all the parents agreed to keep their kids away from phones until they were 15 or something. Great! If you try to roll something like this out to state schools, it looks like “the government”. But it’s the same idea.
I don’t understand the hatred and mistrust of government in this thread. The government protects us from lead in our food, from underage drug use, unsafe roads and lots of other stuff. Why not social media too?
> Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online?
I mean, who cares what the kid wants? It's your job as a parent to be a parent. Sometimes that means telling your kid no, even if that means they're not your best friend for a day or two.
> Would you want that for your kids?
Unequivocally, yes. Social media is cancer. I'd prefer my daughter not be pathologically depressed and my son not turn into a little hateball because of Meta's shitty algorithms. I have no idea why this is even a question, aside from the pure cowardice of Millennial parents.
None of this to comment on GP's suggestion that we don't need laws, or the idea that we shouldn't do this societally anyways.
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What a disgusting response.
I'm saying it for their children's sake.
They will move back to smaller communities away from the public or parents.
Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level. This is terrible "we'll make it up on volume" logic.
It's also the justification used for some of the dumbest laws in history.
Think about what level of enforcement is going to be required for this (National IDs tied to online activity), and then think about the fact that Denmark is one of the main governments pushing chat control. Now start to think about how, once this tracking/enforcement scheme is created, that it might be expanded to things outside the scope of this law.
Like communism, this idea sounds good in theory, but is going to turn into an authoritarian nightmare in practice.
> Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level.
Social media itself doesn’t make sense at an individual level. If you’re the only one on a discord server, it’s not much of a party.
Personally I’m happy for some countries trying this. Let’s run the experiment and see how it goes. I too worry about the age verification system. Let’s see if the mental health of young people actually improves and by how much.
Rest assured, if the US couldn’t take collective action in the face of a global pandemic, there’s no way a law like this will come for America.
Then give parents the tools they need! I can reliably black hole all social media on my home network, and can configure DNS on their phones to do similar. A lot of that knowledge I picked up working in tech, but no tech company is going to offer such robust solutions to parents.
For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids. More importantly the constant appeal to the responsibility of parents misses that this is a collective action problem.
The reason most parents give up to regulate their children's online activity is because the children end up isolated if an individual household prevents their kid from socializing online. All the other kids are online, therefore switching individually ends in isolation. What might be beneficial for each household is unworkable as long as there is no collective mechanism. (which is the case for virtually every problem caused by social networks)
> For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids
This one hit me recently. My 4th grader has a friend who is on tik-toc and has a phone. Me, living in a bubble, where other parents I've met are terrified of social media and phones for their kids, was shocked when I met the mom and she wasn't aware of all the negative impact of social media. But, like with smokers, you can tell them it's bad for you but it's up to them to quit.
It's absolutely a collective action problem.
So... you don't have kids, I take it?
oh yeah, children famously do what their parents are told. especially when it comes to interacting with their friends. and they never are more adept at understanding technology and circumventing parental controls.
Do you have children? You are correct. But it's easier said than done.
Except it's not so easy, because there's social pressure on the kids to use them to fit in with the group.
How about you parent your kid instead of trying to get the government to parent everyone else's? What the hell is you and everyone else's problem who want to get into other families' business.
Disgusting intrusiveness and authoritianism.
A late reply to your outrage: I said I'm in favor, I'm not trying to parent your kids, but the effects of putting a phone (or similar) into most peoples' hands is easily observable and marked. I'm not limiting this to children. I observe it in my father who is 75 and I never would have imagined that he would be addicted to his phone. I observe it in myself, despite taking what most would call extreme precautions against phone addiction.
And I especially observe in my children that whatever limit I set, they will use all of it before they do anything else. I observe kids with their chins on their chest looking at a phone and I know it's not physically healthy. All I said is it's worse than cigarettes (meaning if cigarettes are regulated, phones might outta be too), and I stand by that.
It’s just easier to do some things if they’re prohibited by law. If you don’t want children to smoke, not selling them ciggarettes is a great first step.
All the statistics I’ve seen show that 25-30% of teenagers smoke weed.
It’s but the governments job to make you out not to be the bad guy to your kids.
It’s not their job, but if it needs to be done anyway I don’t mind them doing it for me.
And smoking weed is a hell of a lot healthier than social media.
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You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you are not doing this same thing to every comment trying to remove my freedom, which then will call me some label for disagreeing with COVID policies or whatever then I can't really take any of the guidelines seriously. I was here when it was all about segregating the ones who disagreed from life, even denying healthcare while still forcing them to pay taxes.
We're way past fake politeness when the discourse is always pro war, pro xenophobia for certain acceptable targets (e.g. Russia), pro disparaging certain alleged ideologies/parties (e.g. US republican).
2020-2021 happened and there's been no apology. Till then, the biased moderation rings hollow.
I don't even know what your position or point was. It’s irrelevant. We're don't moderate for/against any side or position. We just don't have time to take that into account. The guidelines apply regardless of what you're trying to say, and we routinely get these kinds of grandiose claims about our covert motivations and biases, when the reality is far more boring: just preventing this site from turning into a flaming hellscape is a big enough task, without trying to complicate things further by promoting any particular ideology or narrative.
For what it's worth I was here behind the scenes in 2020-21, and I know very well that plenty of effort was made to give all perspectives a fair hearing.
What we're asking for is quite simple. The guidelines are a condition of participating here. A sincere effort to observe them is expected from everyone, otherwise it's fine to choose not to participate.
You realize that you're putting your "boring moderating reality" against the very real claims of goverments and people here to
- Remove people who didn't obey the house imprisonment rules during covid from society.
- Removing their jobs and ability to make a living
- Stealing their money
- Denying their ability to healthcare for any procedure
- Be put in camps permanently until they "complied" because "their body, our choice".
Once you factor that type of attack where no human rights nor Nuremberg trial result was respected, the faux civility and non bias rings absolutely hollow.
I'll try to attack their points with more faux civility like you want because staying silent is what got us there, but sometimes it may come up as more raw, since it's very easy to repeat state euphemisms to destroy people's lives but it's harder to counter permeated propaganda.
Edit: Reading my post again, it's absolutely on point. Hard to regret that. How would you write it?
Please don't try to turn this into a debate about pandemic policies. You don't know what any of us personally believed about any of it then or now, and it's nothing to do with the issue at hand.
There's no point having any guidelines or standards for the way this place operates if they change based on the particular issue of the day. The purpose of HN's guidelines is that we should be able discuss any topic, no matter how difficult, as long as we do so in the spirit of curiosity.
Outside HN there's no shortage of places where people can engage in ideological battle and vigorous protest, and I'm fully supportive of your right to do whatever you want to do to fight for the issues you believe in. Indeed, you're welcome to fight for what you believe in here too, but the way it's done on HN is through respectful conversation and persuasion, not aggression.
As for your own history here, the first time I can see moderators having to ask you to follow the guidelines is in 2014, so this pattern goes back years before the pandemic. HN is only a place where people want to come to discuss important topics because other people make the effort to raise the standards rather than dragging them down. Please be one of the ones to make this place better, not worse, otherwise you're welcome to choose not to participate here.
Mmmm...
I'll make it short-ish:
- I'll say goodbye for now. You've given me pause and not because I buy into the fake politeness because I think that's BS (If you may grant me that expletive). - I think bringing 11 year old stuff (2014) without actually even putting the comment shows bad faith and an imbalance of power which tells me all I need to know not to engage further. You win. Point proven. You have power. I don't. Go pretend your world is fair and equitable but, if you have a lot of free time, do analyze how much you stopped calls for denying healthcare and putting people on camps the same way you stop someone telling others to parent their kids instead of removing their freedoms.
Au revoir and thanks for all the fish.
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33765437 holy dolphin. Really? Well, honorary deletion. Too much of a hassle. Way to ruin the dramatic exit with bureocracy.
You need to calm down. That’s a hell of a lot of personal attacks following a comment made in good faith.
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Far worse.
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1000% agree.
If you're a parent then act like one. You're perfectly able to enact that ban yourself - why do you need the governments help?
you can take a teen’s phone off them and they can just walk into a store and buy an inexpensive second hand handset and use the WiFi from a local cafe.
And if they do it with their own money, it's their phone.
Children prior to 18 are not subhuman. If you're old enough to buy your own phone, you're old enough to decide whether and how to use it.
The idea of treating under 18s like they are human is extremely undesirable in the USA because it among other things opens up a lot of doctors to be held accountable for their participation in the mass mutilation of baby boys. It also holds a whole lot of physically abusive parents to a standard where their children could call CPS and get their parents in legal trouble for corporal punishment.
Of course, these are indeed good things in worlds that don't endorse physical violence as the primary method to enforce control. This is why Finland his tail docking, ear cropping, animal crating, corporal punishment, circumcision, etc bans and why the US South is so ruthless.
This is unhinged.
what did i just read
You are also impacted by the real life ketar SCP object that keeps the masses not caring that millions of baby boys in the USA get mutilated shortly after birth.
I am not. One day, that object will be found, shut down and destroyed. I hope you eventually see the error in your current sensibilities.
Are you a parent?
You could make that exact same argument for alcohol, cigarettes, prescription medication - The reasons are the same.
And because of the laws, it has stopped children from smoking, drinking and abusing drugs. The entire war on drugs has been such a success.
Of course age laws have worked. Adults are the smokers, drinkers and drug abusers.
Do you want a situation with kids being drunk in school because they can just go to a shop during break and get a bottle of Vodka, no questions asked?
Really?
30%+ of teenagers smoke weed
https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/everything-you-and-your-...
Statistics for drinking
https://www.responsibility.org/alcohol-statistics/underage-d...
Even when I was in school in the 90s high schoolers were sneaking and smoking during school
To be fair, the "War on Tobacco" has actually been a huge success[1]. I've been saying for years that we should end the War on Drugs in its current form and extend tobacco policy to other drugs. If you're old enough to drink, smoke, and get shipped off to a warzone, who is anyone else to tell you that you don't deserve the freedom to buy a bottle of pharmaceutical-grade heroin at CVS and shoot it up in the privacy of your own home?
But because we collectively insist on infantilizing ourselves, hundreds of billions of dollars per year are redirected from the pharma industry to black market criminal syndicates. Instead of funding medical research and stock buybacks, we're actively choosing to fund global chaos and mass atrocities. We could stop tomorrow, and it would cost us nothing. In fact, it would save the US billions of dollars in annual losses at all levels of government and generate billions of dollars in annual tax revenue, all of which could be used to fund things like addiction treatment services, law enforcement, and border security.
1: https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/tobacco...
And it’s been replaced with more people smoking weed.
https://nida.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/2024/08/canna...
That's great to hear, although they really should prefer vaporization, sublingual administration, and edibles/potables to smoking.
As a parent, you should be able to parent your child, rather than having the government arbitrarily and capriciously do so on your behalf, and for everyone else's kids, too.
As someone who got my first BlackBerry at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or led to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.
(Funny anecdote, but I didn't even figure out how to sign up for Facebook until I was 11-12, because I wouldn't lie about my age and it would tell me I was too young. Heh.)
First, if some parents let their kids use social media and some don't, all kids will eventually use it. You can't cut kids off from social spaces their peers are using and expect them to obey.
Second, this move by Denmark reflects a failure to regulate what social media companies have been doing to all their users.
e.g. What has Meta done to address their failures in Myanmar?[1] As little as was legally possible, and that was as close to nothing as makes no difference. More recently, Meta's own projections indicate 10% of their ad revenue comes from fraud[2]. The real proportion is almost certainly higher, but Meta refuses to take action.
Any attempts to tax or regulate American social media companies has invited swift and merciless response from the U.S. government. To make matters worse, U.S. law makes it impossible for American companies to respect the privacy of consumers in non-U.S. markets[3].
Put it all together, and American social media is something that children need to be protected from, but the only way to protect them is to cut them off from it entirely. This is the direct result of companies like Meta refusing to respond to concerns in any way other than lobbying the U.S. government to bully other nations into accepting their products as is.
Good on Denmark. I hope my own country follows suit.
------------
[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
[2]https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
[3]https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...
Cultures around the world have barred children from certain social places until they go through a rite of passage that the whole society, not just the parents, recognize.
Yes, cultures around the world have done this through parents parenting their child successfully, and not through arbitrary government overreach telling you how to parent.
Not really. The ideal you are describing, where there is no role for the community in regulating public spaces outside the household and determining when young people can enter them, strikes me as highly unusual historically and geographically. It’s an example of that streak of libertarianism that took off from early American internet culture and hardly exists outside internet pontificating.
Social media in the early 2000s is nothing like today.
You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry—appropriate timing for a government to make a law to save kids from the evils of it.
> You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry
You're either operating with an anachronistic notion of what constitutes social media, or you're very out of touch with the public. Not sure which one.
The "myspaces" and "facebooks" are trending down, but other forms of social media like tiktok, discord, reddit, youtube, etc are alive and well, still hooking kids young as they always have.
i think the ban on youtube accounts will just be mildly inconvenient, like not being able to subscribe to channels, or chat in a livestream. they can't ban just watching youtube without an account.
I feel like grouping discord as something hooking kids after we teliably took their third spaces is problematic.
You wouldn't have called the equivalent when you were a kid problematic or even had a word for it. It's often just how they communicate with friends.
I feel as though algorithms dedicated to grabbing as much attention as possible are a major problem (youtube, tiktok), while notification checking on public spaces is also similarly an issue.
But is it so hard to teach your kids how to internet? Id advocate for restrictions but banning seems silly.
The issue is rather the algorithmic feed optimized for grabbing our attention. It's definitely addictive and should be regulated like other drugs.
Give people technology, but let's have an honest conversation about it finally. As a adult it's already hard to muster enough self control to not keep scrolling.
Okay, so explain this to your child, just like you tell them they shouldn't do drugs. Are there not people who are sober by choice? The only thing preventing you from going and smoking crack right now is most certainly not because it's illegal, but because you make a choice not to do so, knowing the negative effects it has on you.
I don't scroll social media. When I was 14-17, sure. But then I lost interest, much like most of my peers did.
(I do probably refresh HN more than I should though, but I think that's probably the least evil thing I could do compulsively...)
The part you’re missing is that the decision to be online isn’t like choosing to do drugs. It’s closer to deciding to go to parties and socialise at all.
Social media for teens is ubiquitous and where your peers connect. It’s being included in your social group, not opt-in thrill seeking.
Most teens will have multiple accounts for various networks - private accounts for their friends, and then again for closer friends. Or they use apps like Discord that parents have no visibility into at all. There is a lot that most parents never see.
For better or worse.
Over what time scale are you suggesting that social media is dying?
I don't think it will ever disappear, but it certainly plays a less outsized role now than it used to, and it's not exactly an industry I see huge growth in.
What we define as "social media" I think is important. I don't really consider things like TikTok to be "social media" even if there is both a social component and a media component, since the social part is much smaller in comparison to the media part. People aren't communicating on TikTok (I think), which is what people concerned about "being left out by their peers" would be referring to. This type of "social" media probably is not dying, but I think is likely stagnant or will become stagnant in growth, while traditional "social media" continues to regress over the next decade.
The problem is the kid feeling left out at school when they're the only one without a smartphone and can't participate in their friends' activities.
...and this needs to be solved with a law? Kids feeling left out over something well and truly inconsequentual?
Not necessarily a law, but it requires some form of collective action.
I highly recommend discussing a smartphone pact such as http://waituntil8th.org with fellow parents before anyone in their friend group gets a cell phone.
> Find out why smartphones need to be delayed in your home (emphasis mine)
Do parents actually fall for this drivel?
Who needs laws! Let's also let them all smoke cigarettes too then while we're at it.
Lol you can order a cigar or pipe tobacco on the internet completely legally without any ID check. Most people don't know this. You can do it with wine, too, for the vast majority of the US. It's not really a problem.
I suspect you need a credit card though? Can kids sign credit card contracts without parent consent in the US?
Moreover just because that laws and regulations are applied inconsistently in the US (and we are talking about Denmark here), does not mean we should completely do away with them.
Not sure if it's changed but I had a debit card and bank account from age 15 when I started working as a kid. I got it without even involving my parents, not sure if you can still do that now, it was before the KYC stuff ramped up to the nines.
Yeh, no.
Parents are doing what they can, but it inevitably comes down to “but my friend x has it so why can’t I have it” - so all and any help from government / schools is a good thing.
This is so, so, so obviously a nasty, dangerous technology - young brains should absolutely not be exposed to it. In all honesty, neither should older ones, but that’s not what we’re considering here.
"Because I'm your parent, and I said no."
Do you buy your kids a toy every time you go to the store? Do you feed them candy for dinner?
Neither of those examples result in social ostracism from peers.
I think you are massively overstating how important it is to the kids that they have a social media account. How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?
With respect, you’re very out of touch.
Connecting online is the primary social space for many kids nowadays, not in person.
Some parents (or those without kids) have a bit of a naive view and think ‘social media’ and just imagine Facebook, instagram etc - things they understand and that don’t provide much connection.
The kids connect using private accounts, completely different apps, or even just inside the chat of other apps like games, if that is where your specific group hangs out.
I agree with what you're saying (including saying that arcfour is out of touch and doesn't really know what they're talking about), but... I do agree with them to an extent. And I have a kid (with another along the way). Kids adapt. They want to be on social media, or games, or Discord, or whatever because their friends are. If they have enough friends in real life doing something fun, that becomes where their specific group hangs out. The number of people you need in that group before it crosses that threshold is really low... 4, 5 people? That's all you need to have a tight knit friend group.
I've seen things like after school D&D club at the elementary school down the street where my son now goes to preschool. I'm optimistic that by the time he's older, there will be even more groups like this and more opportunities for him to have friends where they're doing activities that aren't mediated by screens.
To be clear, I'm not weighing on in on whether or not I think a ban is a good idea. I tend to think it is. But I do think the idea that there's nothing parents can do from the ground up without the help of government (which I'm not opposed to!) is also a bit misguided.
That's rather rude of you, especially since I was actually a kid and grew up during the mass proliferation and ubiquity of social media, to suggest that I am "out-of-touch" compared to... you? (who are likely much older than me, or at best the same age) is pretty ridiculous. I was on Twitter and Facebook at like 12 years old, I've experienced this. And to dismissively suggest I don't know what I'm talking about, on what basis do you say that? The basis that you just disagree with me...saying that a law for this is stupid and an example of paternalistic government overreach? Many people who decidedly do know what they are talking about agree, just as there are many who disagree and know what they are talking about; simply because you are on the other side doesn't mean I must be clueless.
With all due respect, I suspect you don’t have teen kids. Almost their entire social life is organised online.
I don't, but I do have friends, and did have friends when I was a kid growing up during the rise and proliferation of social media and the beginnings of algorithmic content distribution, so I am familiar with it.
> How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?
Easy. If half the conversation happens online, and your kid wasn’t part of that, they’d constantly need to be “filled in” when they got to school.
Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it. You could still go to all the meetings, but there would have been conversations held and decisions made that you wouldn’t even know about. You would feel like you were on the out. Banning an individual kid from social media would be just the same.
> Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it.
Ah, bliss...
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Would you want your kid to be ostracised from their community at school? Do you think that would be good for them?
IMO it’s much better - for everyone - to ban this stuff at the community level. Then there’s no FOMO.
If social media is as bad for them as you seem to think it is, then why wouldn’t it be best for them?
I’m old enough to remember the same trash arguments over video games, rap music, even (for some unknown reason) the Disney Channel. This is just another moral panic.
There were also moral panics about teenage smoking, cannabis and alcohol.
There's three outcomes here, sorted from worst to best
- Kid uses social media, which is bad for kid due to social media.
- Kid doesn't use social media and everyone else does, which is bad for kid due to ostracism
- No kids use social media, which is best for kid because they don't get ostracized.
What you're saying here is to just settle for the middle option which is not as bad as the worst option but is still bad.
This is an overly simplistic, idealistic view of the world that leads to people thinking things like the OP are good and necessary. By recognizing that the world doesn't actually work this way at all—things aren't black and white, they're gray—you come to the conclusion that legislation is the worst way to solve these issues and is totally unnecessary.
> you come to the conclusion that legislation is the worst way to solve these issues and is totally unnecessary.
If you want to argue for that point of view, do so. Put forward actual arguments. Your comment reads as “if you were smart like me, you’d know I’m right”. Which is unfalsifiable and unconvincing.
That's an overly nonspecific criticism. It's more of a compliment of your own cognitive abilities rather than something tangible I can map onto my comment.
Name-calling now? I’ll give you the fourth option that you neglected to include:
- Kids continue to use social media despite the ban, with some using sketchy circumvention services or older friends to gain access, and with others driven to totally unsupervised social media in foreign countries and/or the dark web, with predictable results. The majority of kids rightly see the restrictions placed upon them as unreasonable and grow up with less respect for government and the law, broadly harming social trust as they enter adulthood.
It's a question of magnitudes. There will be at least one kid who does what you're saying, but how many? My strong intuition is that it'll be a small number, too small to cancel out the benefits. The appeal will be largely gone when the network effects are gone. So I say run the experiment in one country and observe the outcome and adjust accordingly. That is the least idealistic position.
As long as it’s not my country and you don’t try to apply your rules extraterritorially, fine. (And feel free to block US-hosted services if you don’t like the way we run things.)
Parent of a 21 and 18 year old so I’m somewhat familiar about how to do parenting, thanks.
Yes, “no” is a tool that more parents can and should reach for. But if you’ve got any experience at all of kids you’ll know it’s really not as straight forward as this. The more responsibility you can push off to others, such as government or schools, the easier this is.
We brought ours up with pretty strong guidelines and lots of “no” but we’re fortunate in having some time and some money and some knowledge about how to block stuff on the network and so on - lots of parents aren’t as lucky. They need all the help they can get.
Describe three hypotheticals to me of what you think will happen in the following circumstances:
* Kid who is told "no" by his parents
* Kid who is told "yes" by his parents
* Kid who "can't" sign up for social media because it's illegal to do so at their age, who then signs up for it when it becomes legal.
I would really like to see what you believe the outcomes of these three scenarios would be, because I doubt any of them are truly catastrophic, considering we are, at best, merely delaying the onset of social media use by the kid by just 2-3 years.
Read literally anything about brain elasticity and then come back and tell me those “just” 2—3 years are unimportant. These are key, critical years for development. Pretty much all the studies are saying it’s fucking us, and particularly our kids.
Personally I want to do something about this, and IMO every move in the direction that helps even in a small way is a good one.
In example 3: Kid lies about their age. Just like they did ever since there was COPA.
Ok so what about selling alcohol to kids? Or cigarettes?
Comparing the internet we grew up with and the modern internet where a army of psychologists have been unleashed with the express intent to massively increase addiction to everything they touch is very foolish
Demanding a law because you are unable to tell your kids "no" makes you the bigger fool.
This is not about telling kids no. This is about companies (and foreign hostile governments!) worth billions of dollars openly studying how best to prey on children's minds. There are things that are just poisonous to society as a concept.
You gonna at least gesture at one of these Cognitohazards that are so poisonous we can't even discuss them? Because I admit to being curious!
> You gonna at least gesture at one of these Cognitohazards that are so poisonous we can't even discuss them
I would show you but you'd need your shatter goggles.
The same people demanding the anti-smart phone laws will rat your ass out the second your kid is spotted walking alone, playing independently, etc. They want to put you in a catch-22 situation.
The real problem here is way less people are parents or people that have no idea what parenting is like, so they don't understand the practicalities of raising children so they come up with the dumbest laws possible and then lord it over you with the full weigh of the state so they can pretend to be parents but with none of the responsibility and all of the smug moral superiority.
Jonathan Haidt, the most prominent psychologist pushing for restrictions on social media use for children, is also the most prominent proponent of letting kids play and roam more freely. So no, those are not the same people.
The people doing that are themselves victims of social media and news fear mongering and engagement maxxing
As someone who sold their first joint at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or let to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.
/s
Absolute statements like yours rarely work, because the discussion is hardly ever about absolutes and more about where to draw the line.
It'll be interesting to see what they can cook up at home. Chat Control was pushed in large part by Denmark, and Minister of Justice Peter Hummelgaard is on record saying some pretty disturbing things regarding the right to privacy online.[1] Now for this, they don't need the entire EU to go along, and any laws already on the books might prove ineffective to protect against means that end up achieving similar goals to Chat Control.
Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph, as well as letters.[2] Turns out online messaging doesn't count. It'd be a funny one to get to whatever court, because hopefully someone there will have a brain and use it, but it wouldn't be the first time someone didn't.
[1] https://boingboing.net/2025/09/15/danish-justice-minister-we...
[2] https://www.grundloven.dk/
Whether internet is covered by § 72 seems undetermined; as far as I can tell the Supreme Court hasn't made a decision on it; but considering that it considered fake SMS train tickets to be document fraud, even though the law text never explicitly mentions text messages: it seems clear that internet communication ought to be covered, if challenged.
Regardless, this wouldn't run afoul of this. This is similar to restricting who can buy alcohol, based purely on age; the identification process is just digital. MitID - the Danish digital identification infrastructure - allows an service to request specific details about another purpose; such as their age or just a boolean value whether they are old enough. Essentially: the service can ask "is this user 18 or older?" and the ID service can respond yes or no, without providing any other PII.
That's the theory at least; nothing about snooping private communication, but rather forcing the "bouncer" to actually check IDs.
>considering that it considered fake SMS train tickets to be document fraud, even though the law text never explicitly mentions text messages
That has nothing to do with the medium of the ticket and is all about knowingly presenting a fake ticket. The ticket is a document proving your payment for travel. They could be lumps of dirt and it would still be document fraud to present a fake hand of dirt.
Except the Supreme Court deemed the case to be of a principal nature, and granted relieve (i.e. no cost to either party), since it was disputed whether a fake SMS train ticket counted as document fraud.
> Regardless, this wouldn't run afoul of this. This is similar to restricting who can buy alcohol, based purely on age; the identification process is just digital. MitID - the Danish digital identification infrastructure - allows an service to request specific details about another purpose; such as their age or just a boolean value whether they are old enough. Essentially: the service can ask "is this user 18 or older?" and the ID service can respond yes or no, without providing any other PII.
> That's the theory at least; nothing about snooping private communication, but rather forcing the "bouncing" to actually check IDs.
Hopefully the theory will reflect the real world. The 'return bool' to 'isUser15+()' is probably the best we can hope for, and should prevent the obvious problems, but there can always be more shady dealings on the backend (as if there aren't enough of those already).
Given the track record of digitalization in Denmark, you can be rest assured this will be implemented in the worst possible way.
This is Denmark. The country who reads the EU legislation requesting the construction of a CA to avoid centralizing the system and then legally bends the rules of EU and decides it's far better to create a centralized solution. I.e., the intent is a public key cryptosystem with three bodies, the state being the CA. But no, they should hold both the CA and the Key in escrow. Oh, and then decides that the secret should be a pin such that law enforcement can break it in 10 milliseconds.
I think internet verification is at least 10 years too late. Better late than never. I just lament the fact we are going to get a bad solution to the problem.
> Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph
That's very much not how danish law works. The specific paragraph says "hvor ingen lov hjemler en særegen undtaglse, alene ske efter en retskendelse." translated as "where no other law grants a special exemption, only happen with a warrant". That is, you can open peoples private mail and enter their private residence, but you have to ask a judge first.
People continue to believe that the "Grundlov" works like the US constitution, and it's really nothing like that. If anything it's more of a transfer of legislation from the king to parliament. Most laws just leaves the details to be determined by parliament.
Censorship really is one of the few laws that are pretty unambiguous, that's really just "No, never again". Not that this stops politicians, but that's a separate debate.
And yet they wanted to push a proposal where the government would have free access to all digital communication, no judge required. So if it happens through a telephone conversation, you need a judge, while with a digital message, you wouldn't have, since the government would have already collected that information through Chat Control.
I don't know where you get your information, but that was not in the chat control proposal I read.
Patrick Breyer has some good thoughts on this.[1]
The relevant points I believe to be:
> All citizens are placed under suspicion, without cause, of possibly having committed a crime. Text and photo filters monitor all messages, without exception. No judge is required to order to such monitoring – contrary to the analog world which guarantees the privacy of correspondence and the confidentiality of written communications.
And:
> The confidentiality of private electronic correspondence is being sacrificed. Users of messenger, chat and e-mail services risk having their private messages read and analyzed. Sensitive photos and text content could be forwarded to unknown entities worldwide and can fall into the wrong hands.
[1] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
> All citizens are placed under suspicion
> No judge is required to order to such monitoring
That sounds quite extreme, I just can't square that with what I can actually read in the proposal.
> the power to request the competent judicial authority of the Member State that designated it or another independent administrative authority of that Member State
It explicitly states otherwise. A judge (or other independent authority) has to be involved. It just sounds like baseless fear mongering (or worse, libertarianism) to me.
Didn't the proposal involve automated scanning of all instant messages? How isn't that equivalent of having an automated system opening every letter and listening to every phone call looking for crimes?
Not from what I can tell. From what I can read, it only establishes a new authority, under the supervision and at the digression, of the Member state that can, with judicial approval mandate "the least intrusive in terms of the impact on the users’ rights to private and family life" detection activities on platforms where "there is evidence [... ] it is likely, [...] that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material".
That all sounds extremely boring and political, but the essence is that it mandates a local authority to scan messages on platforms that are likely to contain child pornography. That's not a blanket scan of all messages everywhere.
> platforms that are likely to contain child pornography
So every platform, everywhere? Facebook and Twitter/X still have problems keeping up with this, Matrix constantly has to block rooms from the public directory, Mastodon mods have plenty of horror stories. Any platform with UGC will face this issue, but it’s not a good reason to compromise E2EE or mandate intrusive scanning of private messages.
I would not be so opposed to mandated scans of public posts on large platforms, as image floods are still a somewhat common form of harassment (though not as common as it once was).
The proposal is about deploying automated scanning of every message and every image on all messaging providers and email client. That is indisputable.
It therefore breaks EtoE as it intercepts the messages on your device and sends them off to whatever 3rd party they are planning to use before those are encrypted and sent to the recipient.
> It explicitly states otherwise. A judge (or other independent authority) has to be involved. It just sounds like baseless fear mongering (or worse, libertarianism) to me.
How can a judge be involved when we are talking about scanning hundreds of millions if not billions of messages each day? That does not make any sense.
I suggest you re-read the Chat control proposal because I believe you are mistaken if you think that a judge is involved in this process.
> That is indisputable.
I dispute that. The proposal explicitly states it has to be true that "it is likely, despite any mitigation measures that the provider may have taken or will take, that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material;"
> How can a judge be involved
Because the proposal does not itself require any scanning. It requires Member states to construct an authority that can then mandate the scanning, in collaboration with a judge.
I suggest YOU read the proposal, at least once.
You must be trolling.
> it is likely, despite any mitigation measures that the provider may have taken or will take, that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material
That is an absolute vague definition that basically encompasses all services available today including messaging providers, email providers and so on. Anything can be used to send pictures these days. So therefore anything can be targeted, ergo it is a complete breach of privacy.
> Because the proposal does not itself require any scanning. It requires Member states to construct an authority that can then mandate the scanning, in collaboration with a judge.
Your assertion makes no sense. The only way to know if a message contains something inappropriate is to scan it before it is encrypted. Therefore all messages have to be scanned to know if something inappropriate is in it.
A judge, if necessary, would only be participating in this whole charade at the end of the process not when the scanning happens.
This is taken verbatim from the proposal that you can find here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20...
> [...] By introducing an obligation for providers to detect, report, block and remove child sexual abuse material from their services, .....
It is an obligation to scan not a choice based some someone's opinion like a judge, ergo no one is involved at all in the scanning process. There is no due process in this process and everyone is under surveillance.
> [...] The EU Centre should work closely with Europol. It will receive the reports from providers, check them to avoid reporting obvious false positives and forward them to Europol as well as to national law enforcement authorities.
Again here no judge involved. The scanning is automated and happens automatically for everyone. Reports will be forwarded automatically.
> [...] only take steps to identify any user in case potential online child sexual abuse is detected
To identify a user who may or may not have shared something inappropriate, that means that they know who the sender is, who the recipient was , what bthe essage contained and when it happened. Therefore it s a complete bypass of EtoE.
This is the same exact thing that we are seeing know with the age requirements for social media. If you want to ban kids who are 16 years old and under then you need to scan everyone's ID in order to know how old everyone is so that you can stop them from using the service.
With scanning, it is exactly the same. If you want to prevent the dissemination of CSAM material on a platform, then you have to know what is in each and every message so that you can detect it and report it as described in my quotes above.
Therefore it means that everyone's messages will be scanned either by the services themselves or this task will be outsourced to a 3rd party business who will be in charge of scanning, cataloging and reporting their finding to the authorities. Either way the scanning will happen.
I am not sure how you can argue that this is not the case. Hundreds of security researchers have spent the better part of the last 3 years warning against such a proposal, are you so sure about yourself that you think they are all wrong?
> This is taken verbatim from the proposal that you can find here
You're taking quotes from the preamble which are not legislation. If you scroll down a little you'll find the actual text of the proposal which reads:
> The Coordinating Authority of establishment shall have the power to request the competent judicial authority of the Member State that designated it or another independent administrative authority of that Member State to issue a detection order
You see, a judge, required for a detection order to be issued. That's how the judge will be involved BEFORE detection. The authority cannot demand detection without the judge approving it.
I really dislike you way of arguing. I thought it was important to correct your misconceptions, but I do not believe you to be arguing in good faith.
Let me address your points here and to make it more explicit, let me use Meta/Facebook Messenger as an example.
> You see, a judge, required for a detection order to be issued. That's how the judge will be involved BEFORE detection. The authority cannot demand detection without the judge approving it.
Your interpretation of the judge's role is incorrect. The issue is not if a judge is involved, but what that judge is authorizing.
You are describing a targeted warrant. This proposal creates a general mandate.
Here is the the reality of the detection orders outlined by this proposal:
1: A judicial authority, based on a risk assessment, does not issue a warrant for a specific user John Doe who may be committing a crime. 2: Instead, it issues a detection order to Meta mandating that the service Messenger must be scanned for illegal content. 3: This order legally forces Meta to scan the data from all users on Messenger to find CSAM. It is a blanket mandate, not a targeted one.
This forces Facebook to implement a system to scan every single piece of data that goes through them, even if it means scanning messages before they are encrypted. Meta has now a mandate to scan everyone, all the time, forever.
Your flawed understanding is based on a traditional wiretap.
Traditional Warrant (Your View): Cops suspect Tony Soprano. They get a judge's approval for a single, time-limited wiretap on Tony's specific phone line in his house based on probable cause.
Detection Order: Cops suspect Tony “might” use his house for criminal activity. They get a judge to designate the entire house a "high-risk location." The judge then issues an order compelling the homebuilder to install 24/7 microphones in every room to record and scan all conversations from everyone (Tony, his family, his guests, his kids and so on) indefinitely.
That is the difference that I think you are not grasping here.
With E2E, Meta cannot know if CSAM is being exchanged in a message unless it can see the plain text.
To comply with this proposal, Meta will be forced to build a system that bypasses their own encryption. There is no other way.
This view is shared by security experts, privacy organizations, and legal experts.
You can read this opinion letter from a former ECJ judge who completely disagrees with your view here:
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Vaj...
I am sorry if you think that I am arguing in bad faith. I am not.
While there is nothing I can do to make you like my arguing style, just know that I am simply trying to make you understand your misconceptions about this law.
The ombudsman will say some strong words and everything will continue as is.
> Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph, as well as letters
And this is why laws should always include their justification.
The intent was clearly to protect people - to make sure the balance of power does not fall too much in the government's favor that it can silence dissent before it gets organized enough to remove the government (whether legally or illegally does not matter), even if that meant some crimes go unpunished.
These rules were created because most current democratic governments were created by people overthrowing previous dictatorships (whether a dictator calls himself king, president or general secretary does not matter) and they knew very well that even the government they create might need to be overthrown in the future.
Now the governments are intentionally sidestepping these rules because:
- Every organization's primary goal is its own continued existence.
- Every organization's secondary goal is the protection of its members.
- Any officially stated goals are tertiary.
Banning personalised ads would solve a lot of the underlying incentives that drives the attention grabbing economy today.
Increasing the age a few years for when young people are allow to make accounts on social media is not going to make a large difference in the big picture of things, and do not address the core problem that is the collection and abuse of massive amounts of personal data.
Upping the age limit a few years is a compromise that big tech can live with. Here in Norway, we've had a 13 year limit for years, but most parents have not cared so far and help their kids register at a much earlier age anyway. This is changing though, as more people realise the downsides of addictive and manipulative apps fighting desperately for our data and attention.
It is frustrating to see how unwilling we are to address the economic incentives that causes the biggest harms.
> Banning personalised ads
I'm in favour of anything that tries to address the appaling effects of social media, but as long as there is advertising that will, surely, be some sort of personalisation. In the past you bought a magazine about, say, gardening, and all the ads were about gardening. The advertisers were betting that most people reading a gardening magazine were interested in gardening products, the ads were, to some degree, personalised.
If online 'personalised' ads were banned how would personalised be defined ?
If the goal is simply to make social media unprofitable, you can just be really brutal and require that all users from a language region visiting a website (or using an App) must be delivered the exact same set of ads.
The fact that most advertisers would flock to promoting on smaller special websites/apps (equivalent to your gardening magazine), is exactly the side-effect we want. The shift in spending will hopefully lead to the current "massive social media platform" model will dying out, and boosting smaller independent platforms.
What’s the benefit of a smaller independent platform? They can be just as problematic…
I’m not sure if you’re just fantasizing about the “good old days” of phpbb or something.
Smaller platforms are worse at optimizing for engagement. It's one of those weird situations where it's a good idea precisely because it's economically inefficient.
> to some degree
This is the key part, isn't it? There's a large degree of difference between "these garden magazine readers might enjoy these gardening ads" and "based on our profile of you collected over 15 years and including every single bit of private data we can acquire about you, we think you might like..."
Personally I think any advertising targeted at children should be banned, but I guess that's probably too extreme.
Ads that could be interpreted as targeted towards children is banned in Norway. Unfortunately we have not managed to enforce this sensible law in the digital realm, where children are routinely and brutally pillaged for their habits an behaviors and shown ads based on their insecurities and fumbling step into the wider world. It is truly sickening to observe society's naïveté, and especially how big tech (and thus data harvesting) has become a mandatory part of schools now, where every child is provided with personal device at the age of 6.
> If online 'personalised' ads were banned how would personalised be defined ?
Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. I'm not against contextually relevant ads. Ads related to gardening makes sense in a magazine about gardening. There is no need to aggregate enormous amounts of personal data in such a scenario because the topic of the magazine (or webpage) is enough to give an idea of the type of readers you get.
I was talking about the current prevailing practice of collecting massive amounts of personal data, fine grained enough to make a psychological profile more detailed than what your closest family and friends could produce. Just to show you ads!
Context can be deduced from the topic of a website, no need to collect, package and sell data so intimate that it could be used against you in horrific ways by the higest bider, be it a nation state or a company.
Imagine if we could just ban cancer as a society and we chose not to because it makes a few people richer than they are.
Seems like an attempt to enforce government ID identification and destroy online anonymity to «protect the children», the very same way it's been done in Britain.
And Australia.
How will they achieve that without introducing a requirement to identify yourself on every online platform, which some would say is probably the whole reason for introducing something promoted as being "for the children"™.
With digital ID. They are releasing it in a couple of months.
https://digst.dk/it-loesninger/den-digitale-identitetstegneb...
I look forward to being able to buy your porn surfing habits on the darkweb in a few years.
The ID card allows age verification without disclosing the identity to the service which needs the age verified.
You don't think that the digital ID provider is keeping logs of which sites requested to verify which users? Even government websites are not exactly known for their high security.
The digital ID provider is only involved in issuing the ID to you. When you use that ID to verify age to a site the only communication is between your phone and the site. The ID provider has no idea when you use the ID, how often you use the ID, or where you use the ID.
Briefly, when the ID provider issues the ID it gets cryptographically bound to your phone. When you use the ID to prove something to a site (age, citizenship, etc) the is done by using a zero-knowledge proof based protocol that allows your phone to prove to the site (1) that you have an ID issued by your ID provider, (2) that ID is bound to your phone, (3) the phone is unlocked, and (4) the thing you are claiming (age, citizenship, etc) matches what the ID says. This protocol does not convey any other information from or about your ID to the site.
This doesn't work because you can't prove the origin of a single bit of data without the associated identity and the origin of the data can only be verified by matching the biometric image on the ID against your real face with a camera.
Otherwise a single person could donate their ID card and let everyone else authenticate with it.
Now you might counter and say it would be enough to give each card a sequential number independent of the person's identity, but then you run into another problem. Each service might accept each card only once, but there are many services out there, so having a few thousand donations could be enough to cover exactly the niche sites that you don't want kids to see.
There is no way to implement this without a complete authoritarian lockdown of everything. There will always be people slipping past the cracks. This means all this will ever amount to is harm reduction, but nobody is selling it on that platform. Nobody is saying that they are okay with imperfect compromises.
Ah, so your phone is the trust point. That's better than it could have been, but it still leaves other issues, like sites with multiple domains or data brokers cross-identifying you based on phone and user information, e.g. 'this phone verified someone on porn site A. This same phone over on social media site B also verified, and on the social media site they have all their real-world info, so now we know their interests', etc.
And before anyone asserts that the phone can be anonymous, that doesn't work, otherwise you can just have an app that claims to have a verified ID attached.
*everyone's
The difference is meaningful. It's mostly prisoners dilemma. If only one persons porn habit is available thats bad for them. If everyones (legal) porn habits are available, then it gets normalized.
Normalized or not, the risk is you get something akin US drug enforcement: ignored for certain demographics, enforced for others. The ability to see someone's porn history is irrelevant until a government (or employer perhaps) wants to weaponize it.
The problem isn't my peers, it's the people in power and how many of them lack any scruples.
Drugs are not legal; porn is.
this seems to run parallel to the "i have nothing to hide" / "well they have everyone's data, so who cares about mine" arguments.
this is too narrow a view on the issue. the problem isn't that a colleague, acquaintance, neighbor, or government employee is going to snoop through your data. the problem is that once any government has everyone's data, they will feed it to PRISM-esque systems and use it to accurately model the population, granting the power to predict and shape future events.
Predict and shape future porn events?
I don't know, this is a bad take. There is good technology to deal with that problem.
https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457390
Would social networks accepting Danish users have to implement the other end of that, or will they also be allowed to use less privacy-oriented age verification solutions (e.g. requesting a photocopy of the user's ID)?
It seems to me like it's either a privacy disaster waiting to happen (if not required) or everyone but the biggest players throwing out a lot of bathwater with very little baby by simply not accepting Danish users (if required).
The wording on the page also makes it sound like their threat model doesn't include themselves as a potential threat actor. I absolutely wouldn't want to reveal my complete identity to just anyone requesting it, which the digital ID solution seems to have covered, but I also don't want the issuer of the age attestation to know anything about my browsing habits, which the description doesn't address.
> everyone but the biggest players throwing out a lot of bathwater with very little baby by simply not accepting Danish users (if required).
The biggest players in social media are precisely the ones that this law is targeting.
No one in charge of implementing this law is going to care whether some Mastodon server implements a special auth solution for Danish users or not, they are going to care that Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc. do so.
> No one in charge of implementing this law is going to care whether some Mastodon server implements a special auth solution for Danish users or not, they are going to care that Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc. do so.
And if that little Mastodon server ends up hosting some content that is embarrassing or offensive to the Danish authorities, laws like this will surely not be used to retaliate...
Arbitrarily and selectively enforced laws seem like an obviously bad thing to me. If the government can nail me for anything, even if they practically don't, I'll be very wary of offending or embarrassing the government.
this scenario can be addressed without digital ID
the social media platforms already measure more than enough signals to understand a users likely age. they could be required by law to do something about it
I would rather outlaw tracking of minors (and adults, too, btw).
It would be a lot simpler to only sell standard devices to adults. Kids should be using devices with curated access to specific tools and platforms meant for children.
In the US they'd just make the platforms massively liable and let them worry about how to enforce. No idea what they'll do in another country.
we get to see how it works in australia next month. there's already stories of kids putting on fake mustaches to fool age-of-face recognition, which is one of the methods used.
i think it'll get to: "these methods aren't good enough, we'll have to enforce digital id".
Do they make parents liable or no? I'm somewhat curious about that as an option.
the EU is working on a system for age verification that won't identify you to the platform. The details are of course complicated, but you can imagine an openid like system run by the government that only exposes if you're old enough for Y.
The platforms asks your government if you're old enough. You identify yourself to your government. Your government responds to the question with a single Boolean.
Our German national ID supports just verifying that you are over age X, with no other info given.
But why would you give your id?
You don't need to, that's the thing. The site requests "are you over 18" and you use your ID to prove it without them getting any other information from it. Requires a phone with NFC, but the app is open source
And the reference implementation requires google play integrity attestation so you are forced to use a google approved device with google approved firmware and a google account to download the application in order to participate. Once this becomes implemented, you are no longer a citizen of the EU but a citizen of Google or Apple and a customer of the EU:
Quick google (on my phone, so not certain) says it works with microg as of August
Yeah, sorry I mixed up the old German Ausweisapp and the euID Reference App
How does the site verify that the ID being used for verification is the ID of the person that is actually using the account? How does the site verify that a valid ID was used at all?
If the app is open source, what stops someone from modifying it to always claim the user is over 18 without an ID?
Not that I understand it, but AFAIK that's cryptography doing it's thing.
And using someone else's Id and password is the same as every method of auth
hopefully the protocol is open source too. I'd hate to find that it just works on iOS and Google certified Android.
I think that ends up being a more difficult problem than just open source. There will have to be some cryptography at play to make sure the age verification information is actually attested by your government.
It would be possible for them to provide an open-source app, but design the cryptography in such a way that you couldn't deploy it anyway. That would make it rather pointless.
I too hope they design that into the system, which the danish authorities unfortunately don't have a good track record of doing.
Should all be open, but I don't know for sure. Works with ungoogled android unless something changed.
https://github.com/Governikus/AusweisApp
That's very cool and good to hear. Thanks for sharing!
It needs to be scaled to the EU level.
*Only for Google Android and Apple iOS users. Everyone else who don't want to be a customer of these two, including GrapheneOS and LineageOS users, will have to upload scans of identity papers to each service, like the UK clusterfuck.
Source: I wrote Digitaliseringsstyrelsen in Denmark where this solution will be implemented next year as a pilot, and they confirm that the truly anonymous solution will not be offered on other platforms.
Digitaliseringsstyrelsen and EU is truly, utterly fucking us all over by locking us in to the trusted competing platforms offered by the current American duopoly on the smartphone market.
This sounds like a temporary issue.
> This sounds like a temporary issue.
There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
There is nothing less permanent than software. Permanent solutions in software last 5 years.
Why? It's not because a hardware token based solution that will work on desktops is technically impossible, but they literally wrote me that they have no plans to investigate the possibility of offering that. This is officially the plan for the permanent solution.
Permanence in software is measured in half decades.
This is an acceptable solution only if the government doesn't know which platform you are trying to access either.
Given all the information companies have about users on social media, do you really believe they can't guess the real age?
Some people: these online companies have too much information about us! They know everything about us!! Where's muh privacy??
Same people now: how will the poor company know that it's an underage user?? Oh noes!
Child abuse is already illegal, the law needs to be expanded to cover these new forms of harm to children. It seems reasonable that I am held criminally accountable if I expose my child to harmful Internet content like social media.
Great. Please raise the age to 115.
I was thinking I know a few people over 65 who are being radicalised, might be an idea to ban it for them too.
The serious answer is that banning "social media" is a bit silly. We should concentrate on controlling the addictive aspects of it, and ensuring the algorithms are fair and governed by the people.
Even if you're half-joking, there's a very real point to this. It's really not solving the problem. It's moving it very so slightly down the line.
I'm not entirely sure how I'd want to word it, but it would be something like: It is prohibited to profit from engagement generated by triggering negative emotions in the public.
You should be free to run a rage-bait forum, but you cannot profit from it, as that would potentially generate a perverse incentive to undermine trust in society. You can do it for free, to ensure that people can voice their dissatisfaction with the government, working conditions, billionaires, the HOA and so on. I'd carve out a slight exception for unions being allowed to spend membership fees to run such forums.
Also politicians should be banned from social media. They can run their own websites.
you are on social media right now.
And Tylenol is a drug just the same as heroin. Do you think that HN has the same sort of impacts on people as instagram or facebook?
Do you think a law which restricts "social media" will be crafted delicately enough to affect Instagram and Facebook but not HN?
Of course not, instead kids will be logging into some russian/chinese 4chan-esque service which has no qualms about the opinion of US law.
This is the way things should be. Down with enforcable laws!
In principle, certainly. In practice, Congress can't be trusted to craft more or less any law these days. I'm not necessarily sure that the law will be able to help us here, but I also think it's not helpful to take the broadest possible definition of social media to try to shutdown discussion. (I'm not suggesting that you are doing that)
Australia's soon-to-take-effect ban affects nine platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, but not HN. These bans often operate on the amount of users a platform has, so HN is unlikely to make the cut. Nobody cares about this site.
I'd gladly give up HN if it means Instagram and Facebook are eradicated. Yes, yes, "those that would trade liberty for security...", but we were better off without any form of social media at all.
I often wonder if posts like this, along with the people who want to ban all cars, etc are just rage bait. Fortunately most of the population disagrees with your preferences. I give “general social media ban” around a 1% chance of success.
Yes, plenty of users here compulsively posting and compulsively checking for responses/upvotes/etc.
I'm aware. If I lost the forum on HN as a side effect, I'd probably be happier overall.
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You know that you can just, you know, cancel your ISP contract and live in a hut in Montana, right?
HN is 'social media', btw.
> HN is 'social media', btw.
Sure is! If you read the thread before posting in the thread, you'd see that it's come up already.
The problem is not social media, it's the few people controlling it. There is no inherent problem in social media, there's an inherent problem of people caring about only their money and power and not giving a jack shit about anything else.
It sounds extreme, but I support banning usage of anything that runs software for children under 13. Under 13, children are still developing their minds, it is important for their welfare that they learn how to function without technological dependencies.
You know how in school they used to tell us we can't use calculators to solve math problems? Same thing. It can't be done by individual parents either, because then kids would get envious and that in itself would cause more problems than it would solve.
It is important for kids to get bored, to socialize in person, to solve problems the hard way, and develop the mental-muscles they need to not only function, but to make best use of modern technology.
It is also important that parents don't use technology to raise their children (includes TV). Most parents just give their kids a tablet with youtube these days.
This is very extreme take. I learned to program at age 10. It is an amazing tool for mind development. Had to invent sine and cosine tables to make my computer games, before even encountering the concept at school.
Is that survivor's bias? there are many other mental development goals chidren should have. for the very small number of children that will learn to program at that age, there is no harm in delaying it a few years, but for the vast majority whose development would be stunted, or worse, they'll be harmed.
Some kids learn to drink and smoke at a that age too, and many turn out ok.
Kids who drink qt an earlier age respect it more. Americans waiting until 21 ends up in binge drink / problem drinking. Social media is going to be the same.
No they don't, that's a lie adults tell themselves. Many adult alcoholics started drinking as children. People who "respect it more" tend to also be alcoholics. Very few people who start drinking as children abstain as adults.
Keep in mind that alcohol is also a carcinogen. Similar to cigarettes, even one drink shouldn't be tolerated. Even if a certain amount will have no ill effects on average, impacts on individuals depends on individual factors, so one harmless drink for you might be one deadly drink for someone else. It is poison.
That said, I don't judge anyone who uses substances. But there is no tolerable threshold to giving children poison.
same and about the same age. however, completely different times. I thought about this a lot and have safely concluded that if I was 9-10 years old now programming would quickly turn into gaming and doom scrolling and … given a choice now of not being exposed to it at same age or nothing until say HS I would choose the latter
Speaking as someone in their 20s - no, I don't think it's a "completely different time". Just 10 years ago, I first learned programming from scripting languages; SourcePawn from Team Fortress 2, and Lua from Roblox/GMod. Predators, hive minds, and self-destructing behavior from children wasn't suddenly invented or rejuvenated after 2016.
All 3 were a total hotbed of bad influences for a child: Team Fortress had trade pub servers with people doing sprays of literal CP and wearing custom lewd skins to harass users with them - and people with very questionable social skills and intentions huddled up in realtime microphone comms with children, Roblox's predator problem for the last 14+ years (at least that I can attest) is suddenly en vogue now that they're a public company and there's stock shorting to be had, GMod is still the community with the most colorful vocabulary I've ever encountered - plus grooming. And much more.
Indeed, you can (and I did) get burned by these actualities when exposed to such communities in your youth - and it can cost you real money, real time, real idealism/innocence, and real mental health. However, I think being exposed to softwares, systems and games that inspired curiosity and led me toward a path of WANTING to contribute brought me to this software development career and life path, and it would have been much more inaccessible and unknown to me in any other way. And I favorited a comment from another HN user a few days ago that goes in astute depth on why that path can only be organically introduced and self-governed [1].
I referred to these places earlier in my comment as "bad influences". I think the single-most powerful thing a parent can do tasked with this dilemma - especially during an upbringing in systemically hard, uncertain, and turbulent times - is teaching them how to identify, avoid, and confront bad influences. Equipped with that, and knowing how to handle yourself, is of utmost importance.
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45718773
YouTube is an amazing tool for learning too yet 99% of the traffic is for brain rot
It doesn't matter how good the tool can be, what matters is how it actually is used
I agree. my argument is that the benefits of learning from youtube or computers in general is overshadowed by their harm for children undergoing development. Once a person is more or less developed, they can tackle riskier learning sources.
> anything that runs software for children under 13
This is perhaps one of the most bizarre opinions I have ever read. This would bar under 13s from using everything from vending machines to modern fridges. What would you consider "using"? Would under 13s be blocked from riding in any car with "smart" features?
This is a perfect example of the kind of nonsensical totalitarian extremism you see on here that people only espouse because they believe it would never affect them. It goes completely against the Hacker ethos.
I was learning to program at age 11. This does indeed sound extreme.
Would it have made a big difference if you learned to code at 13? Is there a pressing need as to why kids need to code at a young age? Maybe there could be exceptions for children that develop sooner? If your other developmental metrics were met early on, I don't see why an earlier age would be a problem.
I don't know, maybe? Maybe it's not up to the state to decide whether my kids developmental metrics allows them screen time before age 13? What kind of nanny state is that?
I don't think that's a nanny state. you can't give your kid alcohol for example at that age, let them drive, get married (don't get me started on some countries!), operate a chainsaw or other dangerous machinery.
This is a danger to their mental development. Look at teacher forums all over. r/Teachers on reddit should be illuminating. Tech and parents sticking devices to their kids instead of raising them properly has resulted in utter disaster. If there was no harm imposed on children, I would agree that it is a nanny-state thing.
My kids (6 and 8) are pretty well raised I'd say, but they do have access to a Playstation and a PC, with clear rules and time limits for use. They are good at making friends and don't do trouble in school, and they also have healthy interests other than playing video games. This is because we actively raise them so they can learn to adjust their needs and interact with others, not because we limit their screen time. The problem today is that many parents seemingly does not raise their kids well, maybe because they don't spend enough time together, perhaps because the parents themselves spend their time scrolling reels.
I myself grew up with a desktop computer from around age 7 and it shaped me early on in a positive way to be curious. Computers were also a central part of my social life. There are many positive things that kids can get out of computers, so I find the comparison with alcohol to be hyperbolic.
In Europe alcohol is given at that age and teaches respect. Waiting until 21 / spring break teaches nothing.
I don't buy that, Europe has a terrible problem with alcohol, and smoking. In the US both have gone down dramatically in the past two decades. The areas with heavy drinking tolerate giving kids alcohol like eggnog on Christmas.
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I'm pretty sure that type of engagement is against HN rules.
That type of nanny state is a literal nanny state, imposing rules for children, like an actual nanny.
The usual figurative nanny state refers to a situation in which unreasonable rules and regulations are imposed on the behavior of grownups, not children.
A literal nanny state is a state that provides nannies.
> Would it have made a big difference if you learned X at 13?
Yes. Kids getting access to knowledge that clicks with them earlier than later makes a huge difference.
Which is exactly why so many people are rushing in to control what kids get exposed to. You seem to have pretty strong thought on the issue yourself, if you agree on the possible negative impact, you can't also deny the possibility of positive impact.
The dose makes the poison, I think we can understand how extreme position tend to bring more negative than positive consequences, regardless of the rethoric.
[edit: rephrased the last part]
I strongly suspect the network connection is the issue, not the software. Let the kids have graphing calculators!
I generally agree. But so much software today is useless without a network connection. Online help (anybody remember those chm files?) was often very very good, because it was supposed to be _the_ documentation for most software.
May these regulations encourage a RETVRN to local-first software.
I was programming age 5 in BASIC. Raspberry Pis are the modern equivalent and I think every child should have one.
> they learn how to function without technological dependencies.
So like the Amish? Or are they still too technologically dependent and children need to be banned from pulleys, fulcrums, wheels, etc.?
I think a better distinction is internet enabled software.
I had a good time programming BASIC on my V-Tech pseudocomputer, at age 9. But that's a world away from tiktok, reels and the predatory surveillance economy.
I think my proposal is easier for parents to enforce, and programming can wait. matter of fact, programming isn't a special skill to learn.
You can teach kids electronics, have them construct toys that work on batteries,etc... work on components that don't require programming. teach them algorithms, math, crypto,etc.. without using computers.
If you're teaching kids how to code, you should give them the skills that will help them learn _what_ to code first?
I don't know much about the Amish, so I can't comment.
Teaching kids how to code isn't all that meaningful on its own. knowing what to do once you learn how to code is. If your plan is to teach your kid how to code, teach them to solve problems without code at that age. Unless you're serious about thinking learning at age 5 vs age 13 would make a big difference.
I think every kid 13 and above should have an rpi too.
I think you're missing the point. 5 year old me was writing their own computer games and at no point did I need or ask my parents how to do it (though they did buy the computer; thanks mum and dad!), they didn't know.
There were a plethora of books in the library on how to program, and here you are suggesting I, and everyone like me, be banned from doing so. You'd probably also ban me from the library by assuming I couldn't read aged 5. I certainly could, especially computer manuals. The computer was an amazing thing which did exactly what I told it, and I learned quickly how precise I needed to tell it, and when I made a mistake, it repeated my mistakes over and over without noticing. I learned more about digital ethics age 5 trying to write games than the typical CEO learns going on a "Do Not Create The Torment Nexus" course.
You'd insist I not be allowed to even use software, let alone write my own. You'd be actively cutting off my future professional life, and depriving entire nations of bedroom programmers cum professional software engineers, with your ill-thought-out ban.
If your children show an aptitude or a fascination for a topic, I hope you feed that and praise them for it.
I think books are great, provided they're age appropriate.
First, my proposal is a delay, not a ban. This is such a good idea, that a lot of FAANG CEO's are doing this for their kids welfare (more or less) already.
I think the overall welfare of kids should be weighed against the benefits.
I think you should have been learning to tinker with electronics, solve math algorithms and develop all kinds of curiosities. the future of being a programmer involves competing with LLMs, you have to be good at knowing what to program. Humans aren't needed when it comes to simply knowing how to write code.
I acknowledge that there will be exceptions, and perhaps that should be considered. but also lookup terms like "ipad babies" and how gen-alpha is turning out. Most parents don't teach their kids how to code in basic. and content regulation for kids is futile, unless you want the government monitoring your devices "for the children's sake".
> If your children show an aptitude or a fascination for a topic, I hope you feed that and praise them for it.
Same, but I hope you let them learn things in the right order and consider their overall long term wellbeing instead of temporary satisfaction. Children did fine without computers for all of humanity's history. the nature of children hasn't changed in the past 3 decades. What you consider feeding might actually be stagnating. If there is a good and practical way to make sure that children are developed well enough to interact with computers, and we can also make sure that the content they consume is age-appropriate without implementing a dystopian surveillance state, i'm all for it.
But pretending the problem doesn't exist, and letting 99% of children suffer because 1% of kids might learn BASIC doesn't sound like a good plan.
That 1% or 20% is the gifted children you want to learn. That 99% or 1% shouldn't hold back gifted kids
> Teaching kids how to code isn't all that meaningful on its own.
it’s extraordinary meaningful as it helps in brain development.
Problem solving does that, the coding part is just a means to that end. Learning a programming language is similar to learning a human language except much less complex. Solving problems with code helps with brain development, as does solving problems without code.
Coding is just more rewarding, it is important to learn how to solve problems with less rewarding systems. Would you have wanted to solve algebra problems on paper if you knew python? You don't need to solve those problems on paper, but it is good for brain development. Even better than coding for example. Keep in mind that a child's attention window is limited, this is very much a zero sum situation.
Pulleys fulcrums, and wheels are not addictive.
Do fulcrums even exist, as independent physical objects? What you say about them not being addictive tempts me to do an entire packet of fulcrums, but I don't know where I could buy any or what they'd look like.
I started learning how to use a computer at the age of 10. This is my career today and has been my hobby for the last 35 years. Learning how to use a computer is like learning math, it needs to happen early.
This ban (or attempt to regulate), similar to Australia's, is at least 10-15 years too late to be honest. It likely would have stopped or lessened the negative impact of FB (and its ilk, but mostly FB, tbh) on much of the society.
Now we know, of course, and everything in hindsight is 20/20.
It's STILL worth trying to regulate social media, now emboldened and firmly established as a rite of passage among youth, adults, and older generations.
There is an interesting exploration of human networks discussed in this veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYlon2tvywA
Basically, when network connectivity increases, the "bad" nodes can overwhelm the "good" nodes. The other ideas discussed are really interesting; well worth watching.
I'm curious as to how social media gets defined for these bans.
I presume text messaging doesn't count whereas Discord/WhatsApp do? What about Minecraft and other games? What about school platforms which they can post comments/messages on? Is watching YouTube included? When I've filled in surveys about our children's social media use, they have included YouTube, which makes it look like every child is on social media.
It does not really require a lot of nuance. Any platforms serving short-form content using algorithmic recommendations, giving any random account infinite reach, a la Instagram/Tiktok/Youtube/Shorts/Reels/Redbook/etc are part of the problem.
WhatsApp groups are a source of slightly different issues - fake news, radicalization, social bubbles - but not a source of addiction to the same level, especially among the young.
I'm a bit suspicious: it was Denmark's government that pushed for chat control.
Why is it always "ban something"? Do we have solutions other than ban everything?
The other option is to destroy something
Why don't governments start at the source instead of at the access?
I always have questions that go a bit deeper but maybe because I think differently. I understand it can trample on rights, but I guess I like to still ask and have the thought experiment anyway.
If things like this are so harmful, and it's recognized why is it okay for a parent to give their child access to it in the first place? Why do kids get to control what they have access to just because parents don't want to parent well, and because they think it'll be a death sentence for their kids social groups? Is it feasible to police parents in that way? Would we even want that?
Think of it similar to alcohol laws. E.g. in the US you don't just want kids to be unable to buy alcohol when their parent is present, you want the point of access to participate in that restriction or it won't work in practice because getting 100% of kids to have good judgement all of the time (or watching them constantly for their whole life) is not realistic. At the same time, many states still have laws allowing alcohol consumption by minors in the presence of their parent because it's really hard to get everyone to agree on a universal binary cutoff with no exception.
In practice, the law does help greatly in spite of not being a mathematical proof the minor will no longer get alcohol because of "parenting well" alone and almost all parents are fine with the restrictions, even in places without the flexibility, because they've come to see and agree with the level of harm over the years. Ie. there is a point enough parents agree strongly enough that the common good of children is accepted over the rights of a parent to decide their child's welfare - it's just usually a hogh bar (e.g. how far punishment can go before it turns into abuse, as another example).
The one thing I don't see and always wonder about with these sorts of things is how they define "social media". Seems like a tough thing to do - if you cast too broad a definition you'll end up with just about anywhere one can communicate on the internet, including email. If you take the very narrow approach of naming FB, IG, TikTok, etc., you almost certainly miss out on whatever the next platform is that's relevant to kids.
Remember YikYak? IIRC that was worse for kids than most of the big social media sites, but how do you write a law that anticipates the next YikYak without banning everything?
I don't think it really matters if the definition is too narrow as long as you ward off the worst threats. An easier way to classify them would be by size: any social network with over 1000 users should have to regulate their users. So as soon as something starts being relevant from a public safety perspective it'll fall under the law.
I am in New Zealand and we are debating this now
I am a dissenter. A ban for children is onerous and how can it be enforced? Who will be punished for infractions?
Better a legal code of conduct for platforms that want to raise revenue in your jurisdiction (the important ones, that the state has leverage over). The code should do two things:
1. Prohibit the targeting of individuals below 21
2. Mandate moderation of spaces where young people gather, with resources to enforce it
A ban is much more satisfying to the do goobers and much worse for those it is supposed to protect
how would you effect what you propose, though, and would such be significantly more difficult to realize than what denmark is proposing?
It would place the compliance burden on social media companies not on parents
Effect it? If you (a social media co.) disobey you cannot collect ad revenue. Advertising on the platform could be banned.
Moving the burden off individual parents who often have a lot on their plates.
Our current form of asocial media is nothing else like drug abuse.
> The move would give some parents — after a specific assessment — the right to let their children access social media from age 13. It wasn’t immediately clear how such a ban would be enforced: Many tech platforms already restrict pre-teens from signing up. Officials and experts say such restrictions don’t always work.
This makes it almost sound like a no-op once enough children convince their parents to give exemptions. Hopefully it works out better than that.
>Denmark's government aims to alienate hundreds of thousands of citizens And people wonder why governments fail. Every time you carve out exceptions you are hollowing out the foundation of your government. Children of the elite' access to social media will remain of course, can't hollow out your true foundation
Consuming is not the same as producing.
They should only ban consuming. (impossible I know, but that hints to the real problem)
Kids need to create.
my kid and me when I was a kid and my Mom and Dad when they were kids have been creators. you don’t need a fucking phone or “social” media to be a creator, what nonsense!
Ok buddy, calm down... we're talking inside of the frame of reference of social media here. No need to go stone age with pine cones and sticks on me.
Kids need to create.
The problem is not "social media", that's just an insanely broad and poorly category. HN is probably "social media". Many games are probably "social media".
The problem is that certain platforms exploit people for profit by feeding them crap, from political propaganda to ads for weight loss drugs. Many of them are designed to be addictive so folks can keep up "engagement". Enough eyeballs make all crap profitable, or something like that.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are tons of great platforms that young people can benefit from, and vice versa. Including HN. Many subreddits. Tons of forums. Loads online games.
Ban the exploitation. Ban the propaganda. Ban the abuse. But don't ban young people.
I agree that it's a broad category, and that Hacker News is social media.
But of all the problematic advertising you could choose, you choose instead political advertising and semaglutide ads?
That's probably the solution: You can run a social media, but you have to do it ad free. Charge people if you need to, but you cannot run ads. What fucks up social media is the constant need to "engagement".
this is a familiar discourse. Ads are more than a thing you "run," they're an idea. You can't destroy the idea of ads. "Ad free" isn't possible to guarantee. Does this make sense?
First part makes sense, ad free seems very possible to me, especially if backed by legislation.
IMO banning smartphone sales to kids and teens would be far more productive than digital ID shenanigans.
Children and teens don't buy their own smartphones, they get them from their parents.
I don't know if that can be implemented, but to me it seems the main problem is the algorithmic feed. I think I would be okay with kids having access to social media, but only if they can't get personalized feed, but can see their friends and maybe specific topics.
I think this would be good for kids but also I want that sort of feed as an adult.
But those "friends" can also be bullies, etc.
Someone's gotta protect them kids from seeing videos of Gaza... And not only in Denmark...
https://israelpalestinenews.org/oracle-tiktok-israel/
OK very nice… Now tell me how will they use this law to increase surveillance on everyone.
Even over the age 15, they have to be restricted.
What are the benefits, with excessive use at least?
Crazy how many people are cheering for this absolute nanny state of affairs
You can really tell the parents vs non-parents in these comments.
Indeed.. All those people that have kids but are not fit to be called a parent so they need the government to do their job!
Why was 15 chosen? I assume there's evidence that older children and adults are able to use social media responsibly and therefore not harmed?
Laws don't require foundation let alone scientific evidence. If either were the case laws would rarely be passed. For Denmark I'd assume it's just vibes among the law makers social class. They have a worldview and by God they will impose it.
As long as the workarounds the kids come up with aren't more harmful than what's being banned, which is usually the case.
I grew up without access to social media until I was 17, had my first "smartphone" at 15.
I am certain it prevented a lot of harm from me.
…and the kids continue to click the “I am over 18” checkbox and set their birthday to 1998.
How do you verify a person's age? Wouldn't that lead to privacy concerns?
Germanys ID has the technical means to allow something like that (age verification without disclosing identity), but knowing the German Gov and their absolute stasis something like this will never happen. It is absolutely necessary to do something like this, because social media has a net negative influence on society.
A lot of kids in my daughters class (~7yo's) are consuming brain rot content already. They shout "SIGMA BOY" or "SKIBIDI TOILET" like little retards during lessons. Yeah memes are cool and all, but not at this age.
While at it, ban lootboxes.
It should be implemented in India too. Biggest consumer market is there I guess.
If you trespass (as kid under 15 or guardian of said kid), do you get fined?
every affliction people think children have is affecting adults as well
So ”curl news.ycombinator.com” will send you to prison?
I hope they can differentiate between social media and social networks.
You usually apply bans like this to something that is unhealthy for _everyone_ e.g. smoking. So why isn't the focus on regulating social media to be better? It seems like it's not great for the whole population in its current form.
"Bans like this" include drinking age, driving age, military service age, consensual sex age, R rated movie age, etc.
To which, I assume, the same question applies?
Generally those don't have population wide, negative impacts (except maybe drinking). I would compare it more to smoking which is considered a public health issue and we regulated smoking out of the market through a combination of safety regulations, limitations on marketing etc. Age bans were part of that but the ID checking requirements there were substantially less risky due to little no risks of retention.
Your initial comment may not have been well stated.
It asserts that underage bans are usually applied to things that are unhealthy for all.
You follow that by stating that provided examples of underage bans are things that are not things with negative impacts on populations.
I'd suggest that real world examples exist of adolecsent alcohol induced brain damage, drivers 10-16 having higher rates of accidents causing death and injury, child soldiers having a negative impact on society, industrial scale under age sex in Christian Brother homes having bad outcomes, early exposure to excessive porn being cited as causing brain rot and social malfunction, etc.
As for:
> we regulated smoking out of the market through a combination of safety regulations, limitations on marketing etc.
I'd point to Australia that started down that path with good results, and continued further only to regulate tobacco out of "regular" markets into the embrace of black markets that come with worse problems than the older established markets that "had a code" (established criminals rarely went after family or indiscriminately acted such that bystanders were killed or injured).
You raise interesting questions that deserve deeper thought and consideration.
Good, IMO it should be 18 if not even higher, but 15 is a good start.
Does that include YouTube? I couldn’t tell from the article.
Reading these comments makes me very happy I decided I should not have children.
I think we need fewer people having children but I also think the whole community should help raise these fewer children.
> I also think the whole community should help raise these fewer children.
Which whole community? Churches, politicians, cops, and that strange 'uncle'?
Let‘s ban social media altogether. In twenty years from now we will have found out that social media is more harmful than tobacco and alcohol combined.
Denmark seems extremely well governed.
Is chess.com considered a social media?
i am thankfull for cellphoneless childhood. Wishing same thing upon my children. Worst thing about all of this is the peer pressure, if all your friends have a phone then you become an outcast, so it is a team effort from all parents.
This should be EU wide, and I was against Chat Control.
Eu-person here. You leave my kids alone.
I'll decide for them, until they're old enough, or mature enough, to decide for themselves. My spouse agrees.
Banning stuff for kids doesn't work, one (of them) will find a way, and once the cat's out of the bag, it's hard to get an elephant in the bag.
So far, education, information, and trust (!! - and I most certainly don't trust them), seems to work for us.
Make it 21.
A reminder, a ban on <$age is actually an ban on $everyone who doesn't provide positive proof of age using identity document.
Make it so!
This is making me hopeful and wish to see this implemented in UK (and everywhere) yesterday..
What we can be certain of: there's going to be a hell of "lobbying" against it.
I wouldn't be surprised if Trump himself comes out crying how this is undermining USA commercial and business intetests! :)
i support this
Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has all crypto fascists governments become wary
here we go again...
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This is not enough, we have to ban under 15s from having smart phones in general.
A reason to be cautious about propositions like these isn't just the inherent belittling of children's right to information, which can be argued for or against in certain cases, but the aspect of giving any proceeding government the ability to ban a form of media from children due to their perception of toxicity, derangement, danger, et cetera.
The inherent belittling of children's right to the enjoyment of alcoholic drinks... Our current form of social media is a drug and it harms our children in all ways and adults too btw.
I don't buy it. The most relevant critique is see is that it's hard to control the age of your users without removing anonymous accounts thus limiting privacy. Well, it's a hard problem but it doesn't feel impossible to solve.
To me there is no question that children should grow up protected from harmful substances. You don't want kids to smoke, scrolling algo feeds is not better. There is enough interesting internet out there without social media!
> You don't want kids to smoke, scrolling algo feeds is not better.
That's a dogmatic axiom until you can show how TikTok causes lung cancer.
You're right, I didn't produce evidence in my comment. Smoking and lung cancer are more clear cut than social media problems in general.
The effects of social media are more complex and nuanced than smoking. There are a lot of studies that show that social media has a negative effect on mental well being. When someones dies of loneliness or birth rates collapse and young people have less sex than ever, social media is never the only cause and might not even be the main reason, but it seems to play an important role.
Also, I don't think all social media is bad. I do love these discussions on HN even or especially when we don't agree, but tiktok and similar services have a lot of bad incentives with regards to user well being.
It's not entirely honest that we argue about 'times the teenager has sex decreasing' and 'collapsing birth rates' being a problem when most parents and society itself heavily discourage their teenagers having sex and/or creating offspring.
Also, I'm not arguing in favour of Social Media here. I just have seen enough moral panics in my years to have become allergic to them. For instance, I'm still waiting for evidence that computer games increase violence in real life, and how comics rot kids' brains.
Strong arguments demand strong empirical evidence. "Well-being" is not, in fact, a good metric (unless we apply it to other aspects of modern life). In fact, the very idea that wellbeing should be a concern in policy is dystopic: Remember that one of the reasons books are banned in "Fahrenheit 451" is that they made readers unhappy.
The teenage sex complaint is coming from socially conservative people, the ones that also simultaneously create as punishing conditions for young single moms and blame them for host of social issues. They are not complaining that teenagers are not being pregnant enough.
They are complaining that young males are not having easy one night stands. They also dont like that girls are empowered to say no. In their minds, the dynamic is all wrong when a young man is not complete pressuring jerk and she can say no.
They dont care about underclass of 16 years old with a life destroyed and a baby.