1000%. I think there are more complex problems in the world that are solved that this. If you look at youth and teenagers activities in Instagram, their photos and videos, and social graph I don't think it is so difficult to detect them, within a high percentile.

You’re all very welcome to whatabout but working at FB is a stain on your character.

"Knowingly preying on vulnerable young people to boost profits" is different from blindly optimizing for engagement without understanding what works.

I honestly don't know, but I don't like so disingenuously simple shoot the messenger answers. That being said, if Facebook amplified it willfully knowing the damage already -- then it's a different issue. And I think there is some evidence of that.

Either way its different than tobacco which was created by the company itself.

One could argue that Meta willingly boosted toxic engagement themselves.

This didn't happen in a vacuum. When a controversial post or comment suddenly pops up in your feed, out of nowhere, participants may be responsible for the responses to it, but Meta is very clearly seeking, targeting, and amplifying that toxic behaviour for profit.

You're on hacker news you should know these types of system design issues...

That may have been true fifteen years ago. There is now a decade worth of scientific literature on social network effects on human behaviour, and I think we can agree that this is hardly something not a single Meta executive know anything about.

> You're on hacker news you should know these types of system design issues...

What I'm suggesting is that this is not an issue for them, but a feature.

The problem is not exclusive to children!

Even if you could successfully bar all children from participating on Facebook, the problem would still exist, and Facebook would continue to harm people.

Now personally I don't use alcohol, don't do drugs (including caffeine), don't gamble, and barely ever use social media (except HN, my one guilty pleasure). But I still think those things should all be legal.

Following your reasoning, anything that could possibly harm children should be banned. Cars sometimes kill children, shall we ban them too?

Now, suppose we do ban Meta. Where should we stop? should we ban open decentralized social media too?

You may not like social media, but a lot of people use them without any particular issues.

If a cop can kill a man in broad daylight for selling loose cigarettes, we should be able to kill a company like meta for breaking the law.

Google.

On public roads, but not otherwise.

Yeah if they sold cars with 0-star zero safety rating claiming that it's just too hard to do anything about making cars safer when you sell cars at scale.

If Meta was a low-margin business, we might buy their argument that "it's just too hard".

There are restrictions around advertising for cigarettes, I think for the same reason. To take it a step further in discussing around cars, I think companies who sell certain sized trucks are aware of the blind spots that make it hard to see people in certain spots. Reasonably, these trucks should be banned, or at least more conservatively, no new trucks with this flaw should be built or sold or require a commercial license.

None of these are cut and dry. How vulnerable does someone have to be before you can exploit them? How harmful does the behavior have to be before it’s exploitation? What is “knowingly” in an organization? How should events be handled if it’s a single engineer operating in the shadows vs a board decision? etc etc etc

The answers to these question may seem obvious to you, and someone else nay have a completely different answer that seems equally obvious to them.

I'm having a very hard time buying this. I may be wrong but I'd assume that Meta is audited and well-regulated. Besides, the company is very transparent. I know a bunch of people working there and they don't strike me as people who would purposely harm people. Besides, every employee has access to the whole code base and freely talk about what they work on. I don't believe in some conspiracy.

That being said, it's perfectly reasonable that we keep these companies under the microscope given the power they have, and they may be making mistakes.

> Is open decentralized social media doing this?

Arguably, decentralized social media without moderation would be more harmful than Facebook/Instagram.

"hurr durr lets ban cars now". PLEASE.

Unlike social media, to drive a car you need a license, you need insurance, and if you run over a kid you most likely will go to prison. Or maybe you weren't driving your car, but it was unsecured, or had a mechanical malfunction. You are still responsible and you will in one way or another have to pay.

But, you can create ads on social media targeting minors with toxic messaging, and nobody bats a damn eye.

It's about time that online commercial endeavors, like ad networks, get reigned in and have rules applied to them, same as for other activities.

let's ban meta because they can't prevent that some kid somewhere is gonna be able to create an account (and may see really horrible things there)

let's ban car because some kids are going to get run over because car manufacturers can't prevent it.

You're welcome

Since we still have cars post regulation, maybe we would still have social media as well.

The poster said laying down requirements and them being unable to scale whilst adhering to those requirements is not an argument for removing said requirements.

Our priority is the safety and health of society, if the only way they can scale is to put people at risk then maybe as a society we don't WANT them to scale.

I was shocked over the summer when I received an email saying I was going to lose some of the Xbox controls we have in place, as if 13 was some milestone of maturity and self-control. AFAICT, I’m legally responsible for my children until they’re 18, and at least at the moment, they are completely dependent on their parents for food, shelter, and transportation. Just because they’re online, I don’t abdicate my responsibility as their guardian, but companies think it’s a good idea to allow kids to bypass the restrictions that were in place because they’ve reached an age that was meant as a minimal age for tracking in a very young Internet.

Unfortunately for our kids, we’ve become extremely restrictive to the service they have access to, they can only use platforms that allow communicating with people we know, etc. Is that the right move? For us, right now, it seems to be.

COPPA was the culmination of a series of progressively more narrow attempts to restrict internet content and practices using “think of the children” as a justification, the previous efforts were, but for some standalone bits (like Section 230, which survived from the mostly-unconstitutional Communications Decency Act) struck down as unconstitutional, which is why there haven't been attempts to update it with more broadly applicable restrictions—its already the outcome of a process of backing off to the maximal constitutional restriction (OTOH, with a socially conservative Supreme Court that is unusually unconcerned with respecting precedent, I suppose now would be the time, if you wanted to do that.)

I know of exactly zero places I take my children (activities, sports, clubs, etc.) that would speak to them privately to coerce them to use that service more without parental consent. That's what Meta and a million other online services are doing to children.

My home kitchen doesn't routinely serve strangers. The forum I host trough a server in my cupboard does.

If you want to make a comparison, it's between a small family restaurant and a giant fast food chain. It may surprise you but food inspectors treat both in roughly the same way.

Face it. Nothing meaningfully logically separates my forum from giant social media companies apart from scale.

Hence, small forums hosted by hobbyists and volunteers should be shut down.

But that doesn't mesh very well with your original post, does it? You argued that if it's impossible for Facebook, Twitter and other social media to monitor every post, then they shouldn't exist.

I'm sorry but it's not OK to create a rule just for Facebook that's impossible for Facebook to follow. If you want to outlaw Facebook, there are better ways than this Kafkaesque circus.

Most states have cottage food laws, with basic regulations for small-scale commercial production. E.g. you need to take a course on food safety, you need your water tested, and you can only sell up to $X per year, but you aren't subject to random inspections. There is no reason why the web shouldn't be regulated similarly, with different rules based on the size of the audience.

If we have different rules depending on scale, how is it OK for the rules for large scale social media platforms to be impossible to comply with by large scale social media platforms?

In practice though, it's not unreasonable to say that we should expect more from companies that can cause harms at a much larger scale. Perhaps there's some kind of threshold where we can accept some harm being done at a small scale while still not allowing harm at a much larger scale. Seems fair enough.

If hobbyists can't comply, maybe it's about time we prevented small independent forums from existing.

Moderating the News board became too arduous and carried potential legal liability.

So they turned the board off.

It’s really not that hard.

And anyway, just because you can’t fix everything, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and fix something.

All or nothing thinking leads to inaction.

It's invite only Groups on Telegram, FB Messenger, or Apple Messages mostly.

So it has ended well for my social circle ;-)

Before the obvious argument "where do you draw the line?", I may add that only a select and obvious number of social platforms reach the level of Meta's.

Now you want to exempt everyone apart from giant social media companies from that same rule?

This is getting a bit Kafkaesque.

Your example is describing an externality, a cost imposed on a unwilling third party. Facebook is a platform that individuals can choose to avoid or restrict their children from using if they deem it harmful. These situations are not comparable.

> no business has a right to exist independently from its standing in the system of laws and the health of its users - especially children.

I disagree. Businesses and websites ought to have a right to exist as long as they do not inflict harm on third parties and their users participate willingly. Individuals ought to be free to make decisions regarding their own health and that of their children. If we were to consider otherwise, can you fathom the sheer volume of things we'd need to prohibit?

Yeah just like alcohol and drugs, you can easily restrict your children from using them so companies should be free to sell to whomever. Good parents ensure their children aren’t doing this.

Nope. It's also your problem, because it has to be enforced somehow. Few websites are age appropriate for young children (this one certainly isn't), so perfect enforcement would mean essentially no viewing websites without login, and all logins requiring display of face and government issued ID to live webcam.

The ID check is already in place for several countries with YouTube if you try to view an age restricted video.

I don't understand what that means, and how I can know if my business in inside or outside the law.

Simply put this sentiment on the landing page of your website, labeling on your product or, if you have a mailing list, in the subject field of your next newsletter. “I do not understand if my business is inside or outside the law” is bound to generate useful feedback

So often I've seen the opinion that effectively expresses that some company or business plan has a God-given right to be viable. Not directly of course but through about-face when someone points out that the company's business proposition conflicts with something—but how will the business make a profit if it has to [submit to government regulation] because of [concerns about marketing to children]?

Some people could probably steadfastly support a new business that was selling something dangerous but that was new and “innovative”. “Oh well people just have take responsibility for their own well-being—regulating crystal dust fumes™ would be way too onerous and impractical.”

Indeed, it is doubtful that these mega-sized websites were intended by the original architects of the www. More likely, they may have imagined the web as a whole would grow (scale) as more people gained internet access. Instead the "Silicon Six" intend only to scale their own gargantuan websites that they now refer to as "platforms". All web publishing and even internet communications are expected to be intermediated by a handful of surveillance advertising companies. What a disaster.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/25/silicon-si...

This, I think, is roughly true but the issue is nuanced. The history of the web can be characterized by ever-decreasing barriers to entry. At first you needed a physical host and apache. Then, you could have a shared host and put html files in your user directory. Then, you could run wordpress. Then, you could sign up for myspace and never have to run anything. The 'like' is the smallest unit of content that can be captured by such systems. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, wikipedia, etc are what you get from this evolution.

The unexpected downside is that with reduced friction to content-creation, the content has become quite awful. In part because people are awful, but also because of money and how effective it is to hire people to say things using these systems. If the friction to create content remained high, it may have been a "better" internet in some measures. It would certainly be a much smaller one.

Who knows how it will turn out? I suspect that AI will have a significant impact on all these systems, to wit, injecting massive amounts of noise that will reduce their utility significantly, if not to zero. No empire lasts forever.

I find the history interesting. But I started using the www in 1993. There were no so-called "tech" companies like Facebook or Google. Younger web users born into a web intermediated and surveilled by so-called "tech" companies for the purpose of advertising may have no such interest.

Not to jump to the defense of social media companies, because I honestly think they're not worth the cost of keeping around, but who gives a shit what the original architects of the www intended?

They weren't forming a country and making a constitution. Hell, even for constitutions I don't really care what original founders wanted, and for the most part, and most of them also thought you shouldn't care either, as they meant for them to be amended.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/31/23854369/texas-porn-age-v...