In my opinion, these governments haven't implemented 'effective' bans (though maybe chilling, as you say) but primarily created awkward new grey markets for the personal data that these policies rely on for theatrics. Remember when China 'banned' youth IDs from playing online games past 10PM? I think a bunch of grandparents became gamers around the same time...
Making something difficult to do actually works to _curb_ behavior.
It's infantilizing and dumb. Grown adults should be allowed to smoke tobacco if they so wish and smoking rates are already way down due to marketing and alternatives. Noone needs to be prosecuted.
Just see how many people already go through that trouble to source illegal drugs...
If you think taking tobacco away from consumers is infantilizing, why yes, yes it is. We are dealing with children's futures. Adults get to continue smoking, children less likely to even want to smoke as the social acceptance goes down and with that there is less and less desire to smoke. Nicotine doesn't do much other than get you addicted, no one is chasing after a pronounced high with it, people start smoking because it's perceived as cool.
I can't imagine an adult wanting to start smoking, most adults get addicted in their teens.
I think you have have an import ban, and a black market, and still see significant gains in eroding the demand. I do not think people should be prosecuted for possession, but the UK will probably make some bad decisions there, but that doesn't mean the overall policy is bad.
I just noped out of it entirely.
I think the government should invest in giving parents the tools to control their child’s online access. Tools such as DNS blocklists, open source traffic filtering software which parents could set up in their home, etc.
[0]: https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/rules/childrens-onl...
When I was first getting online, the expectation was that you at least had to be bright enough to lie about your age. Now I have to occasionally prune my timeline after it fills up with "literally a minor." Even an annoyance tax might have some positive effect. Scare the pastel death-threats back into their hole...
So kids get a social media "license," maybe.
Almost all parents either don’t care or opt for the second option (which I also think is the better one), but the dynamics today are that between 10-12yo the pressure to get your kid a smartphone will mount and you have to give in at some point. Being able to wait till 16 would be much better IMO.
It's interesting how every generation seems to decry new forms of media as eroding the fabric of society. They said it about video games, television, music, movies, etc. I'm sure we're right this time, though.
Whether you agree or not that they’re “eroding the very fabric of a society” (I would argue they are), it should be acknowledged that almost all the downsides predicted have come to pass, and life has gone on not because these things didn’t happen, but in spite of them having happened.
Video games are typically fiction, so the ability to pass propaganda through them is usually a little more limited. It isn’t impossible, just different.
Social media is a pretty bad news source for contentious issues. We should be pretty alarmed that people are getting their news there.
Plenty has been written already on the ravaging effects of social media on society and it's pretty plain to see.
https://www.mcleanhospital.org/essential/it-or-not-social-me...
> Rates of sexual activity have been in decline for years, but the drop is most pronounced for adults under age 25 (Gen Z).
> For Gen Z, a rise in sexlessness has coincided with a decline in mental health.
> Sexual activity can boost mood and relieve stress and may serve as a protective factor against anxiety and depressive disorders.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-myths-sex/2022... missing-out-the-benefits-sex
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiat...
I only changed 2 words for 1.
To me, the only way out of this is by changing one nightmare for another giving the gov't the decision of allowing/denying access. Human nature is not a simple thing to regulate since the desire for that regulating is part of human nature
I agree that neither solution is perfect, but exchanging an imperfect but undoubtedly free system of communication for one that is explicitly state-controlled censorship is an obvious step backwards.
"Thinking about the children" should also involve thinking about what kind of a society you want to build for them. A cage is not the answer, especially not with fascism creeping back into our politics.
Social media has long since past just being a means of communicating with each other, and you come across as very disingenuous for putting this out there.
I don't deny that kids can get into trouble and find shocking or dangerous things online. But kids can also get in trouble walking down the street. We should not close streets or require ID checks for walking down them. Parents should teach their kids how to be safe online, set up network blocks for particularly bad sites, and have some kind of oversight for what their kids are doing.
Maybe these bills should mandate that sites have the ability to create "kid" accounts whose history can be checked and access to certain features can be managed by an associated "parent" account. Give parents better tools for keeping their kids safe, don't just give the government control over all internet traffic.
I've suggested no such thing. In fact, I described putting regulations in place as a "nightmare". Parenting alone will not work. Self regulation from the socials will not work. The entire situation is a nightmare of our own making. There is no simple solution. These tendencies of human nature were present long before social media. It was just fuel for the fire for the worst qualities.
They won't engage on this topic in a fair and balanced manner. I've tried. They want unlimited ability to push agendas and incite strife and they just throw out keywords and thought-terminating cliches when criticised; diversity, marginalisation, fascism, they just gaslight and gaslight and gaslight.
I mean, don't stop trying, but you'll be very frustrated
No, it's not about that either. It's the algorithmic nature of social media apps which rewire the brain's mechanisms in unnatural and unhealthy ways. Predators are a minor concern besides this one. See https://www.afterbabel.com/archive?sort=top
People said the same thing about age restrictions for smoking, alcohol, movies, and on and on and on.
It's not some unsolvable new problem just because it's the ad-tech industry.
There's extensive evidence that social media is exceptionally harmful to people, especially children. And in this case there's also a major network effect. People want to be on social media because their friends are. It's like peer pressure, but bumped up by orders of magnitude, and in a completely socially acceptable way. When it's illegal that pressure will still be there because of course plenty of kids will still use it, but it'll be greatly mitigated and more like normal vices such as alcohol/smoking/drugs/etc. It'll also shove usage out of sight which will again help to reduce the peer pressure effects.
This will also motivate the creation/spread/usage of means of organizing/chatting/etc outside of social media. This just seems like a massive win-win scenario where basically nothing of value is being lost.
I have 5 children. Does that count?
> It's not as easy as saying "no social media" to your kids.
I didn't. I taught them about risks so they'll have tools. But social media isn't where life-changing harm came from.
The harm came from growing up in a world with 24/7 adult presence and zero places to roam. It's development-ruining hellscape that 10k years of children didn't have before.
Social media is a powerful, addictive and dangerous. Pretty much anywhere on this earth, parents will end up in jail or lose custody of their kids, if they give them harmful substances like drugs. Social media should be regulated like how drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes are regulated.
I'm a pretty pro-market guy, but there are times when the interests of the market are orthogonal to the interests of mankind.
> "Do you also think that children should be allowed to buy cigarettes? I'll be honest, I am not certain that social media is any less deleterious than tobacco."
To which I pointed out that cigarettes kill far more people than social media. And your response was somehow that I'm implying that a less-bad thing is good? Are you sure you're following the conversation? It's really not clear that you're addressing anything I said, and it's unclear what your point is.
If you weren't, then I think you were being a bit pedantic, because I don't think the person you were replying to was literally suggesting that millions of smoking deaths were equivalently bad to social media. Context matters, and the context of the conversation is legal restriction of social media.
Either way, feel free to ignore my comment if it bothers you.
The law prevents the corporation from directly engaging with the child without parental oversight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_tattooing_in_t...
Your position is that decisions about youth access to social media should be fully taken from the parents and made by govs instead. Penalties can be assumed from your examples.
This is the reality that you want imposed on parents and children - yes?
edit: Apparently Missouri is not the only state. I had trouble finding a definitive list though. There are also other exceptions such as wine during religious service.
A smoker moving to vaping is an enormous benefit to health and society.
Yes, the regulations that made this happen are good. That's my point.
> Waste from single use vapes is also a huge problem.
Nothing like the cigarette butts that used to be everywhere.
> Similarly there are health effects specific to vaping, time will tell if cancer is among them.
We've plenty of data to safely conclude vaping is safer than smoking tobacco. That doesn't make it safe, but it's absolutely safer.
But you have raised my curiosity about your relationship with vaping. Do you work in the industry?
Bullshit. Both are nicotine delivery methods. One is far better for both individual and societal reasons. Water and whiskey are both wet, but that doesn't make them the same.
> But you have raised my curiosity about your relationship with vaping. Do you work in the industry?
No, nor do I vape/smoke. I'm just old enough to remember how shitty it was to have smokers everywhere, in a way that isn't the case for vapers... and I've seen the multi-decade decline in lung cancer incidence stats.
Most of the harm from smoking comes from the smoke, not the nicotine or associated addiction.
The goal of this is to bring attention to the fact that it's a problem and should be seen as undesirable, like pornography or Joe Camel. The cancellation of Joe didn't prevent kids from getting cigarettes but it did draw attention to the situation and there has been a marked decline in youth smoking since the late 90s when the mascot was removed. It's correlative, for sure, but the outcomes are undeniable. The same happened with the DARE program and class 1 drugs (except for marijuana iirc).
Here's just one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448384/
Even just making illegal the promotion of social media toward children would have a huge effect.
And you have to be trolling with your second paragraph.
SCOTUS has routinely struck down prohibitions against the same things in other media, including explicitly the internet.
This isn't the right way to frame the question. The Constitution prohibits government actors from infringing upon the right to free speech[0], including that of children; meaning e.g. an attempt to censor a child's treatise on some subject would be as illegal as doing the same to an adult. It's not that you get a "free speech license" when you turn 18. The restrictions on government power applies whether or not the person being infringed upon is a minor or an adult.
[0]: This isn't an absolute, unqualified right. A child breaking into a profanity-laden tirade in the middle of class at a public (meaning taxpayer-funded and an extension of the government) school may believe they are exercising their First Amendment rights, but the school may still legally send that child home, for example, on the grounds that it disrupts the schooling of other children.
There is zero positive to giving kids the ability to access social media sites designed to be addictive when they don't have the mental facilities to determine real from not real. Many adults seem to suffer from this as well. Plus kids don't understand that the internet is forever, really no need for an adult looking for a job or running for office to be crippled by a questionable post they made as an edgy teen.
I'm against a lot of government regulation but in this case I am even more against feeding developing kids to an algorithm
Just remove the temptation and pressure all together.
It's the same problem with requiring age verification for porn. It's not that anyone wants kids to have easy access to this stuff, but that any of these laws will either be (a) unenforceable and useless, or (b) draconian and privacy-destroying.
The government doesn't get to know or regulate the websites I'm visiting, nor should it. And "protecting the children" isn't a valid reason to remove constitutional rights from adults.
(And if it is, let's start talking about gun ownership first...)
That seems intuitive, but it's not actually true. I suggest looking up zero-knowledge proofs.
Using modern cryptography, it is easy to send a machine-generated proof to your social media provider that your government-provided ID says your age is ≥ 16, without revealing anything else about you to the service provider (not even your age), and without having to communicate with the government either.
The government doesn't learn which web sites you visit, and the web sites don't learn anything about you other than you are certified to be age ≥ 16. The proofs are unique to each site, so web sites can't use them to collude with each other.
That kind of "smart ID" doesn't have to be with the government, although that's often a natural starting point for ID information. There are methods which do the same based on a consensus of people and entities that know you, for example. That might be better from a human rights perspective, given how many people do not have citizenship rights.
> (and probably unconstitutional under the First Amendment, to boot.)
If it would be unconstitutional to require identity-revealing or age-revealing ID checks for social media, that's all the more reason to investigate modern technical solutions we have to those problems.
When a citizen of Rust programmers social graph uploads code, he can prove his citizenship via his id. We may not even know his name, but he can prove his citizenship. He can sign his code via his signature, even pull request in other projects. He can prove his ownership of an IT company, as it's CEO, the stock shares and what not. And he will be tied to a reputation system, so when a supply attack happens, his reputation will be tainted. Other citizens of Rust's social graph, will be able to single out the id of the developer, and future code from him will be rejected, as well as code from non-citizens.
Speaking of supply chains, how about the king of supply chains of products and physical goods? By transferring products around, in a more trustworthy way, by random people tied to reputation, Amazon may get a little bit of competition ain't it?
see also an older comment of mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38800744
All we need to do is replace the word "moderate" with "curate". Everything else is an attestation.
We don't really need a blockchain, either. Attestations can be asserted by a web of trust. Simply choose a curator (or collection of curators) to trust, and you're done.
Additionally the map of governments which accept Esthonian passport might be of some relevancy here[1].
Tinker v. Des Moines has repeatedly been chipped away (e.g. Bethel School District v. Frasier).
Minors cant produce pornography.
Minors have their freedom of association and expression limited by employment laws.
Minors speech is not free at home due to parental control or at school.
Minors can’t consent to medical treatment which limits their ability to discuss sensitive issues.
Minors cant vote or run for public office, which limits their direct participation in political expression and civil engagement.
All that would do is give people with children multiple votes.
Wrong I’m afraid. Minors don’t have full rights, that’s why their bag/locker/car can be searched randomly, why they can have speech abridged, why they can’t see NC-17 movies(edit: scratch that one). The supreme court has weighed against minors many times.
This is not a law, this is a voluntary regulation undertaken by the motion picture industry.
The first amendment is a restriction on Congress, and does not apply to the private Motion Picture Association that maintains the film rating system.
> why they can have speech abridged
I don't think that's true of federal law. There are cases, such as in school, where more restrictions are permitted to the school. But those restrictions are not based on age.
After 18 you can choose whether to be in school or not. Those restrictions are voluntary for adults but compulsory for minors (who do not get to choose whether they go to public school, private school, homeschool, or just pass the GED)
This has always disgusted me about public school.
No better way to erode rights and democracy than ingraining absolute tyranny in children. I was never search but I was convicted and punished many times on zero evidence, just some authority assuming I did something.
You are not free to enter the White House to express yourself.
Enforcing a property owners right to refuse entry (digital or physical) does not prevent you from expressing yourself, but rather from doing it that specific property.
Social Networks are not a public space
- either a stolen card can be reused thousands of time meaning that it's so easy to get a fake that it's not worth the implementation cost
- either there is away to uniquely identify a card and then it becomes another identifier like tracking ids.
- Have your backend generate a temporary AES key, and create a request to the verifier saying "please encrypt a response using AES key A indicating that the user coming from ip X.Y.Z.W is over 16". Encrypt it with a known public key for the verifier. Save the temporary AES key to the user's session store.
- Hand that request to the user, who hands it to the verifier. The verifier authenticates the user and gives them the encrypted okay response.
- User gives the response back to your backend.
Potentially the user could still get someone to auth for them, but it'd at least have to be coming from the same IP address that the user tried to use to log into the service. The verifier could become suspicious if it sees lots of requests for the same user coming from different IP addresses, and the service would become suspicious if it saw lots of users verifying from the same IP address, so reselling wouldn't work. You could still find an over-16 friend and have them authenticate you without raising suspicions though, much like you can find an over-21 friend to buy you beer and cigarettes.
Since you use a different key with each user request, the verifier can't identify the requesting service. Both the service and the verifier know the user's IP, so that's not sensitive. If you used this scheme for over-16 vs. over-18 vs. over-21 services, the verifier does learn what level of service you are trying to access (i.e. are you buying alcohol, looking at porn, or signing up for social media). Harmonizing all age-restricted vices to a single age of majority can mitigate that. Or, you could choose to reveal the age bucket to the service instead of the verifier by having the verifier always send back the maximum bucket you qualify for instead of the service asking whether the user is in a specific bucket.
> and the service would become suspicious if it saw lots of users verifying from the same IP address
This implodes under CGNAT, cafe internet, hotel internet, etc.
We do need to get people onto ipv6 so CGNAT can die. Restricted services could potentially disallow signups or require more knowledge (e.g. full ID) if coming from shared IPs as a risk mitigation strategy, depending on how liable we want to hold them to properly validate age. If you've already signed up for facebook at home, obviously you don't need to validate your age again at the cafe.
Fake IDs exist in the real world. The system doesn't have to be perfect, and we can say that there's some standard of reasonable verification that they should do for these sorts of cases.
Personally I'm more in favor of an approach where sites label their content in a way where parents can configure filters (ideally using labels that are descriptive enough that we don't get into fights over what's "adult", and instead leave that decision to individual families), but if we're going to go an ID-based route, there are at least more private ways we could do it, and I think technologists should be discussing that, and perhaps someone at one of these big companies can propose it.
- Have the service generate the request as above, but now the request is "Please encrypt a response with key A for the user coming from ip X.Y.Z.W".
- Service calls a standard browser API with the request, telling the browser it would like to know the user is in the over 16 bucket. Browser prompts the user to verify that they want to let the service know they are over 16. Browser sends the request to the verifier.
- Verifier responds with a token for each bucket the user is in. So a 22 year old gets an over-16 token, an over-18 token, and an over-21 token.
- Browser selects the appropriate response token and gives it back to the service.
So the service only ever learns you are over the age limit they care about, and the verifier only ever learns that you asked for some token, but not which one.
There is no physical card - there is an attestation that only an enrolled device can hand out with revocation support in case of security flaws.
Is it going to be absolutely secure? No. The cost just needs to be high enough that it becomes inaccessible to the vast majority of adolescents.
Theft of your parents phone becomes a lot easier attack vector but phone biometrics/password requirements will thwart that for most parents.
This doesn’t need to be 100% fool proof.
Making it illegal is, by itself, enough to discourage a lot.
You have an incentive to keep the secret token to yourself, and would probably use existing mechanisms for that: You might manage like your phone number, private email and other personal accounts today. Not perfect, but effective most of the time for most people.
You might decide to share it with someone you trust, like your sibling. That's up to you, but you wouldn't share it widely or with people you don't trust, even under pressure, because:
To prevent mass reuse of stolen tokens, it's possible to use more cryptography to detect when the same token is reused in too many places, either on the same site or across many sites, without revealing tokens that don't meet the mass-reuse condition, so they still can't be used for tracking. If mass-reused tokens auto-revoke, they can't be reused thousands of times by anyone, and that also provides an incentive to avoid sharing with people you don't trust.
I won't pretend this is trivial. It's fairly advanced stuff. But the components exist these days. The last paragraph above requires combining zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) with other branches of modern cryptography, called multi-party computation (MPC) and perhaps fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).
Sure, but is the Florida legislature actually looking into stuff like this?
That's not enough proof to levy a requirement.
If the zero-knowledge proof doesn't communicate anything other than the result of an age check, then the trivial exploit is for 1 person to upload an ID to the internet and every kid everywhere to use it.
It's not sufficient to check if someone has access to an ID where the age is over a threshold. Implementing a 1:1 linkage of real world ID to social media account closes the loophole where people borrow, steal, or duplicate IDs to bypass the check.
The revocation list means nothing when they can get ahold of someone’s older sibling’s ID and sign up for social media.
Did everyone just forget what it’s like to an ambitious kid who wants to get online?
Do people really think a platform that needs people to jump through these hoops and use this imaginary international ID architecture is feasible?
Does anyone really think that kids won’t just set their location to Estonia and/or use a VPN to circumvent all of this?
Revocations are not for the individual ID but if an exploit is found compromising the IDs stored on a trusted element. Your older siblings ID can’t be used to sign for millions of accounts - just those who the older sibling lets borrow their phone that has their ID (and assuming there isn’t some kind of uniqueness cookie that can be used to prevent multiple accounts under a single ID). That’s a much different and more manageable problem (fake ids via older siblings have been a thing for forever).
No, this line of reasoning deserves nothing but absolute contempt when it comes to laws. We are not talking about getting the finnicky API to work at your job. Too often laws have had unintended consequences as a result of loopholes or small peculiarities. If the damn law doesn't even work on a fundamental level then it should be opposed on principle.
If there is no risk involved, everyone will jump on doing it.
That only covers large-scale reuse. It doesn't cover lending your id to your younger sibling if you want to, or if they find a way. Maybe that should be acceptable anyway. Same as you can lend your phone or computer to someone to use "as you", or you can buy them cigarettes and alcohol. Your responsibility.
Potentially there could be coordination between .gov and the service to track users by having each side store the temporary AES key and reconcile out-of-band. But .gov has other ways they could get that information anyway if they have cooperation from businesses (e.g. asking your ISP for your IP address, and asking the service provider for a list of user IPs).
I trust that it _would_ work 100%,but what I don't trust is that a government would implement it properly and securely, because no government works like that lmao (even NZ's great one).
I mean living in the UK now I got like a dozen different fucking gov numbers for all manner of things, dvla, NHS, nin, other tax numbers, visa, etc...why isn't there just one number or identity. Gov.uk sites are mostly pretty stellar besides.
There's just one problem. How does the machine proving your age know that you are who you say you are? Modern cryptography doesn't have any tools whatsoever that can prove anything about the real body currently operating the machine--it can never have such a tool. And the closest thing that people can think of to a solution is "biometrics," which immediately raises lots of privacy concerns.
Is using FaceID a privacy concern? This mechanism can be built into phones much like passkeys.
I also dont want third party crapware on my device to access the internet.
"wowee it can be done without revealing my identity to anyone but the government or the corp running the chain"
No thanks
1. Your fancy encryption scheme is pointless if your plaintext can be acquired at either endpoints, of if a bug in the implementation leaks data. The security of the whole matters a lot more than the individual parts as attackers go for the weakest link.
There are 2 situations.
1. Everyone who wants to access restricted content needs to access a government or corporate tool to generate their wallet or keys or whatever you want to call it.
2. Everyone in the jurisdiction is required to sign up for the tool.
1. Is effectively putting yourself on a list for future fascist governments to purge.
2. Is an onerous burden on the entire population. We had enough issues with Digital TV.
Ditto, if you apply for internet porn license, you will be on a list of internet porn enthusiasts. Its non trivial information that its largely in your best interest not to provide the government.
Again this all happens before your zero knowledge check.
To access your fav porn site, you provide claim that you're above 21 that porn site is able to verify.
There is no link revealed between your identity and porn. There are no lists.
Zero-knowledge focuses precisely around this fact of not revealing extra information.
https://github.com/zk-passport/proof-of-passport
Today you can scan your passport with your phone, and get enough digitally signed material chained up to nation level passport authorities to prove anything derived from the information on your passport.
You could prove to an arbitrary verifier that you have a US passport, that your first name starts with the letter F, and that you were born in July before 1970, and literally share zero other information.
There are some wrinkles that prevent passport data being used more broadly - technically it is a TOS violation to scan passports / use the icao pkd without permission from the passport holder's CSCA (country signing certificate authority). Some CSCAs allow open use but many do not.
Also, without being too pedantic about it, what you are able to prove is more like posession of a document. An rfid passport (or rfid dump & mrz) - or in fact any kind of identity document - does not prove that you are the subject - you need some kind of biometric bind for that.
This means you can literally just write a rust program that reads in the private data, verifies the signature, reads the first byte in the name string and confirms that it matches what you expect, and then after everything looks good, it returns "true", otherwise it returns "false". This all would happen on your phone when you scan a QR code or something that makes the request, then you send the validity proof you generated to the verifier, they can see that the output was true, and nothing else.
In theory, the private data would be stored on a trusted device you own, like your phone or something, so someone who steals your phone would have a hard time using your identity. Using fancy blockchain stuff you could even to a one time registration of your passport such that even if someone steals your passport, they wouldn't be able to import as a usable ZK credential. Presumably there would be some logic around it so you can re-register after a delay period or something, giving the current credential holder a chance to revoke new enrollment requests or whatever. So, yes, proving your exact identity to a website isn't perfect, but it's easy enough to make it really noisy if someone is trying to tamper with your identity, and maybe that's good enough.
If you want to go the trusted hardware route, you could make someone take a picture of their face with some sort of trusted hardware camera on their phone or laptop, and then use some zkml magic to make sure it kinda looks like the face on the passport data. Given the right resources, trusted hardware is never that hard to tamper with, so I don't like that solution very much.
What's often more important in an online context is that your credential is unique. It doesn't matter who you are, it matters that you've never used this credential to sign up for a twitter account, or get past a cloudflare captcha, or any other captcha use case. If you steal 10 passports, maybe you can set up a bot that will automatically vote for something 10 times, but at least you can't vote millions of times. This is sybil resistance, and it's massively important for a ton of things.
I don't get what causes the proof to fail if I provide the wrong bytes to the zkvm when it tries to read from inside the hashed area after the hash & signature are verified (this might not be directly sequential I guess).
Put another way, I get we have to zk prove that a) I know a message M that hashes to H ... (can see this is do-able from googling), but also that a particular byte range M[A-B] is part of H, in a way that the verifier can trust I'm not lying and I don't see how the second bit is accomplished. It feels like there are also details in proving that the data comes from the right "field" in the DG1.
This stuff is such black magic!
Of course you need to trust that the hash is not reversable.
That doesn’t stop kids from using Facebook, but it stops kids’ ID from being used to create an account.
A better solution is more robust device management, with control given to the device owner (read: the parent). The missing legislative piece is mandating that social media companies need to respond differently when the user agent tells them what to send.
I should be able to take my daughter's phone (which I own), set an option somewhere that indicates "this user is a minor," and with every HTTP request it makes it sets e.g. an OMIT_ADULT_CONTENT header. Site owners simply respond differently when they see this.
https://jeannecolemanlaw.com/the-legal-emancipation-of-minor...
i.e. even as an emancipated minor, being treated as a "legal adult" does not mean you can buy alcohol or tobacco.
If we assume parents are involved enough to "buy the thingy that advertises a parental lock", then a whole bunch of less-dumb options become available... And more of the costs of the system will be borne by the people (or at least groups) that are utilizing it.
I haven't read the legislation myself but I don't see why this couldn't still be done, I doubt the legislation specified _how_ to do it.
So no, that wouldn't work right now.
If we're already trusting a parental-locked device to report minor-status, then it's trivial to also have it identify what jurisdiction/ruleset exists, or some finer-grained model of what shouldn't work.
In either case, we have the problem of how to model things like "in the Flub province of the nation of Elbonia children below 150.5 months may not see media containing exposed ankles". OK, maybe not quite that bad, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere.
Rating: RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA
in HTTP responses that include adult content, and every parental controls software in existence will block it by default, including the ones built into iPhones/etc and embedded webviews. As far as I know all mainstream adult sites include this (or the equivalent meta tag) already.
In general, I don’t think communicating to every site you visit that you are a minor and asking them to do what they will with that information is a good idea. Better to filter on the user’s end.
It's much easier to regulate and enforce that websites must expose these headers so that UAs can do their own filtering. Adult Content = headers in response, no ifs, ands, or buts
Response headers are encrypted in the context of HTTPS, so there's no real sacrifice in privacy. Implementation effort about as close to trivial as can be. No real free speech implications (unless you really want to argue that those headers constitute compelled speech). All in all, it's a pretty decent solution.
The First Amendment guarantees free expression, not anonymous expression.
For example, there are federal requirements for identification for political messages. [1] These requirements do not violate the First Amendment.
[1] https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/advertisi...
I am staunch believer in the moral and societal good of free speech.
Anonymous speech is far more dubious.
Like, protests seem valuable. Protests while wearing robes and masks however...
This is absolutely permitted in America. It is illegal in countries like Germany which have no strong free speech protections.
They're Klan Acts, because a bunch of guys in masks and robes marching through is obviously a threat of violence.
As a general rule of thumb, almost every time someone brings an edge case about whether or not speech is First Amendment-privileged before SCOTUS, SCOTUS rules in favor of the speech. (The main exception is speech of students in school.) SCOTUS hasn't specifically ruled on anti-mask laws to my knowledge, but I strongly doubt it would uphold those laws.
You don’t have to pontificate. The link was right there.
If you assume a just government that doesnt demand revenge for every petty slight, you are living in a fantasy land.
Since about half a year I've noticed the German Twitter section getting sunk in hate posts, people disrespecting each other, ranting about politicians or ways of thinking, but being really hateful. It's horrible. I've adblocked the "Trending" section away, because its the door to this horrible place where people don't have anything good to share anymore but disrespect and hate.
This made me think about what we're really in need for, at least here in Germany, is a Twitter alternative, where people register by using their eID and can only post by using their real name. Have something mean to say? Say it, but attach your name to it.
This anonymity in social media is really harming German society, at least as soon as politics are involved.
I don't know exactly how it is in the US but apparently it isn't as bad as here, at least judging from the trending topics in the US and skimming through the posts.
Also:
https://theconversation.com/online-anonymity-study-found-sta...
>> "What matters, it seems, is not so much whether you are commenting anonymously, but whether you are invested in your persona and accountable for its behaviour in that particular forum. There seems to be value in enabling people to speak on forums without their comments being connected, via their real names, to other contexts. The online comment management company Disqus, in a similar vein, found that comments made under conditions of durable pseudonymity were rated by other users as having the highest quality. "
- No more bots or fake propaganda accounts.
- Illegal content, such as insults or the like, will not get published. And if it does, it will have direct consequences.
I'm also not tending towards a requirement to have all social networks ID'd, but I think that a Twitter alternative which enables a more serious discussion should exist. A place where politicians and journalists or just citizens can post their content and get commented on it, without all that extreme toxicity from Twitter.
Say for example I held the opinion that immigration threshold should be lower. No matter how many non-xenophobic justifications I can put on that opinion, my possibly on H1B colleagues can and would look up my opinion on your version of Twitter and it would have a real impact on my work life.
There is a reason why we hold voting in private, it's because when boiled down to its roots, there are principles that guide your opinions they are usually non -reconciliable with someone else's opinion and we preserve harmony by keeping everyone ignorant of their colleagues political opinions. It's not a bad system, but it's one that requires anonymity
It's been deliberately designed to cause strife. They are genuinely anti-human companies that seem to want conflict and tension to occur.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/30/facebo...
This article was very on-the-nose, that really should have been the writing on the wall.
They would change their algorithms immediately if large advertisers applied financial incentives. We've seen some of this with Youtube's policies leading to videos with censored profanity where its use was previously normal and neologisms like "unalived" to mean killed.
Musk's Twitter may be a partial exception since it's decisions are now driven by a single man's preferences rather than an amoral mechanistic imperative to increase shareholder value. That doesn't seem to have improved things.
I mean, how do you know that?
How do you know that the goal isn't actually to perform social engineering on a huge scale and that the advertising is just the way that goal is being funded?
With TikTok, there's some chance geopolitics is a factor as well.
Not necessarily, consider the counterexample of devices with parental-controls which--when locked--will always send a "this person is a minor" header. (Or "this person hits the following jurisdictional age-categories", or some blend of enough detail to be internationally useful and little-enough to be reasonably private and not-insane to obey.)
That would mostly puts control into the hands of parents, at the expense of sites needing some kind of code-library that can spit out a "block or not" result.
Probably not. Minors have all sorts of restrictions on rights, including first amendment restrictions such as in schools.
"(And if it is, let's start talking about gun ownership first...)"
Are you advocating for removing ID checks for this? If not, it seems that this point actually works against your argument.
Not saying that I agree with a ban, but your arguments against it don't really stand.
COPPA has entered the building. If you're under 13 and a platform finds out, they'll usually ban you until you prove that you're not under 13 (via ID) or can provide signed forms from your parent / legal guardian.
I've seen dozens of people if not more over the years banned from various platforms over this. We're talking Reddit, Facebook, Discord and so on.
I get what you're saying, but it kind of is a thing already, all one has to do is raise the age limit from 13 to say... 16 and voila.
We ARE talking about social media.
Like, the least private software on the planet.
Aren't the really problematic social networks the ones where you've lost your privacy and anonymity long ago and are being tracked and mined like crazy?
Ban portable electronics for children. Demand that law enforcement intervene any time it's spotted in the wild. If you still insist that children be allowed phones, dumb flip phones for them.
It could be done if there was the will to do it, it just won't be done.
Not at all. Just the social media sites, which are objectively bad for kids. As an adult, you do what you want on the internet.
You do realize that laws like this would apply to sites like HN, Reddit, the comment section of every blog, and every phpBB forum you ever used? It's not just Instagram and Tiktok.
If we want to "ban social media" we'll need a consistent set of guidelines about what counts as social media and what doesn't, and what exactly the harms are so they can be avoided.
I don't believe that's as easy as you think.
Laws do not have to be perfect to be good, but they do have to be workable. It's not clear that there's a working definition of "social media" that includes both TikTok and Reddit but doesn't include random forums.
Yes. Imperfect solutions, when driven by the government, don’t change for decades, causing terrible consequences.
“SSH is a munition” comes to mind.
But with the topic at hand being social media, I think a lot of the same issues and solutions apply. It's harmful to allow kids to interact with anyone and everyone at any given time. Boundaries are healthy.
Aaaaand, finally there's much less destruction of human livelihood by guns than both of the aforementioned topics if we measure "destruction" by "living a significantly impoverished life from the standard of emotional and mental wellbeing". I doubt we could even get hard numbers on the number of marriages destroyed by pornography, which yield broken households, which yield countless emotional and mental problems.
So, no, guns aren't something we should discuss first. Also, guns have utility including but not limited to defending yourself and your family. Porn has absolutely zero utility, and social media is pretty damn close, but not zero utility.
I have no doubt that if your proposal were to pass that there would be significant efforts from extremist conservatives to censor LGBT+ communities online by labeling sex education or mere discussion of our lives as pornographic. How are LGBT+ people supposed to live if our very existence is considered impolite?
Nevermind the fact that the existence of a government database of all the (potentially weird) porn you look at is a gold mine for anyone who wants to blackmail or pressure you into silence.
The horrors and dangers of porn are squarely a domestic and family issue. The government does not need to come into my bedroom and look over my shoulder.
I wholeheartedly agree. And that’s a problem we should lean into and solve. Its difficulty doesn’t make it less worth of solving.
> The horrors and dangers of porn are squarely a domestic and family issue.
Therein lies the problem however. Every systemic issue in our world begins in a family or domestic situation of some form. While I am well aware and also concerned about the implications of government overreach here, I don’t think we can throw up our hands and say, “Meh”. At a minimum it can begin with education. We can teach people about the destructive nature of porn (and social media).
The fact that this impacts every family, domestic situation, and therefore indirectly or directly touches every single life in our society actually kinda makes it a great candidate for government oversight.
This is the first I've heard about this. Link?
AFAIK there is no real legislation banning a trans person in public.
If you don't want a record of you looking at it, then don't look at it. All you need to do is refrain from pornography consumption. It really is that easy and simple.
Social media is on the internet. It is not the internet.
They already do (e.g. gambling), and in my opinion they should. Federal regulation is IMHO desired in cases where there is a huge power imbalance between corporations and consumers to the detriment of the nation. Social media companies wield more power than the average parents can cope with and it’s hugely detrimental to have entire generations of kids growing up being complete useless insecure brainwashed unconfident depressed virgins who can’t even articulate the difference between man and woman. That’s a sick dying society and it’s not good so it makes sense to regulate the thing which is undoubtedly the root cause of it.
> who can’t even articulate the difference between man and woman
Can you articulate that difference? Personally, I'd expect a more complete definition from a kid today than I would from a conservative adult. For example, my dad might refer to DNA when explaining the difference between a man and a woman, and he would also confidently say he's a man (I mean, he is my dad), but since he's never had a DNA test, how can he be sure? It's obviously about more than DNA. My mom might say a woman is someone who can have children, but what about women who cannot have children, are they not women? Etc.
Ahh, you're one of those people. I now can just discount everything you said.
Technically you can make that work without issues (You only need to prove your age not your identity, something which can reasonably be archived without leaking your identity).
There are just two practical issues:
- companies, government and state (at least US police & spy agencies) will try to undermine any afford to create a reasonable anonymous
- it only technically works if a "reasonable degree" of proof is "good enough", i.e. it's must be fine that a hacker can create a (illegal?) tool with which a child could pretend to be 16+, e.g. by proxing the age check to a hacked device of an adult. Heck it should be fine if a check can be tricked by using the parents passport or phone. I mean it's an 16+ check, there really isn't much of a reason why it isn't okay to have a system which is only "good enough". But lawmakers will try nonsense.
Interestingly this is more a problem for the US then some other states AFIK due to how 1) you can't expect everyone 18+ to have an id and everyone 16+ to be able to easily get one (a bunch of countries have owing (not carrying) id requirements without it being a privacy issue. 2) Terrible consumer protection making it practically nearly impossible to create a privacy preserving system even if government and state agencies do not meddle.
Similar if there wouldn't be the issue with passports in US it probably wouldn't touch the First Amendment as it in the end protects less then a lot of people believe it does.
The bulk of the internet has not been anonymous for a while. Facebook requires an id already, Google tracks you using Google and the OS, reddit is tightening to control bots, amazon requires a phone number.
Think about it. What portion of your activities day to day on the Internet are anonymous? Now try to do them anonymously. It isn't practical/possible anymore and the internet of yesteryear is gone.
Surely not.
Imagine: government sells proof of age cards. They contain your name, and a unique identifier.
Each time you sign up to a service, you enter your name and ID. The service can verify with the government that your age is what it needs to be for the service. There are laws that state that you can't store that ID or use it for any other purpose.
Doesn't seem impossible.
- It will likely be phished very quickly (and you'd have no way of knowing since no one is storing it). (making it short lived, means u'd have to announce tot he goverment eveytime u want to watch porn)
- Eventually there will be dumps of ids, like there are dumps of premium porn accounts now
Still doesn't do anything about foreign websites.
I do. Anything to avoid "the talk", tbh. I grew up Catholic. I never had "the talk". I don't even know where to start. Blow jobs?
Anonymity services can still exist without fostering an environment to addict children and young adults to social media or a device... and without your precious "rights" being taken away.
No, it isn't. Check out Yivi [1]. Its fundamental premise is to not reveal your attributes. It's based on academic work into (a.o.) attribute-based encryption. The professor then took this a step further and spun off a (no profit) foundation to expand and govern this idea.
Depends on the argument being made, on the ideology of the audience, on the current norms, etc.
I had an exchange here on HN some time back (topic was about schools removing certain books from their libraries), and very many people in support of those books, which dealt with gender-identity and sexual orientation, also supported outright porn (the example I used was pornhub) for kids of all ages as long as those books with pictures (not photos) of male-male sexual intercourse could stay in the library.
Right now, if you made the argument "There are some things kids below $AGE shouldn't be exposed to", you'll still get some (vocal) minority disagreeing because:
1. They feel that what $AGE kids get exposed to should be out of the parent's hands ("Should we allow parents to hide evolution from their children?", "Should we allow parents to hide transgenderism from their children?")
2. They know that, especially with young children, they will lose their chance to imprint a norm on the child if they are prevented from distributing specific material to young children.
In the case of sex and sexual education, there is currently a huge push for specific thoughts to be normalised, and unfortunately if it means that graphic sexual depictions are made to children, so be it.
The majority is rarely so vocal about things they consider "common sense", like no access to pornhub for 10 year olds.
Hopefully this will reduce amount of people using social media.
e.g. You could set up a restricted account on a device with a user birthdate specified. Any requests for websites that return an AGE_REQUIRED header that don’t validate would be rejected.
I also believe that this is a Big Deal™ that we need to take seriously as a nation. I have yet to see any HN commentator offer a robust pro-social media argument that carries any weight in my opinion. The most common "they'll be isolated from their peers" argument seems pretty superficial and can easily be worked around with even a tiny amount of efforts on the parents' part.
As an added bonus, this latest legislation removes the issue of "everyone is doing it". I mean, sure, a lot still will be—but then it's illegal and you get to have an entirely separate conversation with your kid. :)
This is so incorrect it makes the flat earth theory look good.
I'm not American, I think it's perfectly reasonable to ban kids from the internet just by applying the logic used for film classification. Even just the thumbnails for YouTube (some) content can go beyond what I'd expect for a "suitable for all audiences" advert.
This isn't an agreement with the specific logic used for film classification: I also find it really weird how 20th century media classification treated murder perfectly acceptable subject in kids shows while the mere existence of functioning nipples was treated as a sign of the end times (non-functional nipples, i.e. those on men, are apparently fine).
Also, I find it hilariously ironic that Florida also passed the "Stop Social Media Censorship Act". No self-awareness at all.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jul/31/margaret-pomera...
The first is saying that no matter what your rules are, the internet may at any time show you a clip from the highest rated category and should be treated as such.
The internet may also at any time show you outright banned content, but that's often treated as a separate battle no matter if that's Tiananmen Square (or "content promoting terrorism", although now I'm wondering if the Chinese Communist Party think the former is a subset of the latter?) or sexual acts you're not allowed to show in film (varies by jurisdiction).
Not even close. I am with you
It happened to me and millions of others.
However, especially in Florida, social media may be the only way for some teens to escape political and religious lunacy and I fear for them. I think it's not wise to applaud them taking away means of communication to the "outside", in the context of legislation trends and events there.
Why don’t you take it away from yourself? Just delete your account.
Addiction mechanics are a real thing and sooner or later social media will pop into your life again. For me it's Reddit, not Instagram or Twitter. Luckily, HN makes me always ragequit at some point, cause y'all are a bit special.
My kid, and I have told my wife this, is ready to view whatever he wants on the internet when he can circumvent me.
Do you think simply labelling it as bad is sufficient? Parents have no idea.
Land of the free - let people do what they want. I know my kid isn't getting anywhere near a screen though.
Every generation has this freakout about something or another. I expect modern kids will end up better at handling social media than their parents are.
- I'm not the biggest fan of hard cutoff
- addictive dark patterns which cause compulsive use should be general banned or age restricted no matter where they are used, honestly just ban most dark patterns they are intentional always malicious consumer deception not that far away from outright committing fraud. (And age restrict some less dark but still problematic patterns.)
- I think this likely will make all MMORPGs (and Roblox, lol) and similar 16+, I'm quite split about that. I have seen people between 14-18 get addicted to them and mess up their education path. But I have also seen cases of people which might not be alive anymore today if they hadn't fund a refuge and companions in some MMORPG.
- I guess if it can make platforms like YT, Facebook, Instagram, Snapshat etc. implement a "teen" mode with less dark patterns and tracking it would be good.
- The balance between proving your age and making things available and keeping privacy is VERY tricky (especially in the US) and companies, the government and spy agencies will try to abuse the new requirements for age verification to spy more reliable on everyone 16+.
- It's interesting how that affects messengers. Many have less dark patterns, some do not track users, or can easily decide not to track children. The aren't social networks per-se. But most have some social network like features. Even such which do not try to create compulsive use might still end up with it as long as their as is "live" chatting.
How would you write a law that accomplishes your goal?
Where [..] is a rough definition of dark patterns which there exist multiple of in CS and which you can base on factors like 1) deceptiveness, 2) intend to manipulate the users behavior, 3) how it interact with various human feedback systems etc.
The thing about law people on HN often tend to forget or complain about is that they intentionally do not need to be perfect precise scientific definitions, predicate logic, or anything like that. This means you can reasonable describe them by likely effect and weather it seems reasonable that the effect could have been intended (without bothering to actually determine intend) without needing to go into _any_ technical details outside of clearing that indeed any form of user interface is covered.
We need to find a better way, for example (just a quick idea), social websites run and protected by a school-by-school basis. This way, it can be regulated and controlled.
In other words, government should regulate what they already have control over, not impose new control measures over things they don't.
It’s dumb policy, because Florida GOP. The smart move is to target advertising for kids. If you attack the ability to advertise to the underage audience using mom’s iPad, social media will self police.
- Make this an ISP level thing? Somehow? They already know the makeup of a household. If they know a house has kids, something something ToS "You as the parents are liable..." Then maybe repeat those scary RIAA letters but "for good" when someone in that household hits a known adult IP?
- Maybe browsers send an "I'm an adult" flag similar to "Do Not Track," and to turn it on, the user has to enter a not-to-be-shared-with-kids PIN? If the browser and OS can coordinate, OSes would be able to tell the browser if the user is an adult, and skip the PIN entering.
- Force kids to use a list of Congress-approved devices that gate access to the wider Internet? YouTube Kids but for everything. Yes, hacker kids will be able to get by, but this being Hacker News, they'd deserve the fruits of that particular labor.
Just spitballing. Anything obvious I'm missing?
PS- I am neither for nor against the Florida-type legislation as of this comment.
I would've backed your argument up until a few years ago, but the science is coming down pretty hard now showing that social media use is absolutely detrimental to still-developing minds.
It is not reasonable to expect parents to spontaneously agree on a strategy for keeping kids off social media- and that kind of coordination is what it would take, because the kids + social media companies have more than enough time to coordinate workarounds. Have the law put the social media companies on the parents side, or these kids may never be given the chance to develop into healthy adults themselves.