Last I checked if you're over 60 then you're an Adult and can do adult things. You have long since stopped growing into your body by then. Children are not finished yet, and continue to have their brains mature and grow into the early 20s

Banning <16 year olds from social media is for their protection. Banning >60 from social media (and I’d add voting) is for everyone else’s protection.

Damn ageism. There’s some amazing 60yo assembly devs out there.

And society wants them dev'ing amazingly in assembly, not doomscrolling!

I could say that for all ages. Having known the world pre-social media I really do wish we could go back.

There's nothing keeping you here on a social media website. Dunno why you wanna control what others do with their time

> There's nothing keeping you here on a social media website

There’s nothing keeping you here in a casino, gambling your wages away.

There’s nothing keeping you here in a bar drinking yourself to oblivion.

There’s nothing keeping you here smoking three packs a day until you’re shitting tar.

The age old advice to “just stop” doesn’t quite work for those most at risk. Harm minimisation is a reasonable thing. We don’t think it’s a good idea for young kids to smoke, drink, drive, vote or have sex. Since we know that social media can be specifically harmful to the youngest demographic, why wouldn’t we want to regulate it based on age?

> Since we know that social media can be specifically harmful to the youngest demographic

Who is this "we" that accepts that uncritically? I've been on "social media" since I was 8yo and my little brother has been on social media since he was a baby. Now he's becoming a doctor. He grew up with the 1st gen iPhone which was released 17 years ago.

FWIW I think the drinking age of 21 in the US is kinda silly. Many Americans start driving at 14 (with employment letter) or at 15.5 and many Americans buy their first rifle at 18 years old.

Who’s being uncritical here? I’m not an alcoholic and neither is my sister. That doesn’t mean alcoholism doesn’t exist nor that there aren’t very real harms to a small subset of the population. Great enough harm (that also impacts on non-alcoholics), that we’ve collectively decided to regulate an otherwise legal substance. Would you suggest that we shouldn’t age-limit alcohol? And even with the things you quote - driving and gun ownership - there’s still an age limit, not no age limit. The specific number is irrelevant and up for discussion, but we’ve still decided for those things that there exists a “too young” category.

EDITED to remove a stupid phone autocorrection/autoinsertion.

"There's nothing keeping you here on a social media website."

The people for instance, when everyone is on social media, you won't find people in the streets anymore, except for the homeless and junkies.

(but luckily it is still possible to find people in the real world, but it did became hard to find real undistracted people)

Seems like a strawman, I can think of plenty of reasons people want to control others' time. It's the literal job of every CEO for starters.

What happened to Liberty?

The CEO is not controlling their time, he's buying it and they're selling it.

What other reasons do you have?

No CEO controls my time. What are you on about?

> I can think of plenty of reasons people want to control others' time

So can I

- They want to control people like property - They want to impose their views and values - They don't want any competition - They have a power trip - They want to use others time for their own benefit

What else am I missing?

EDIT: I should point out that in general what happens to other people does impact me so I do have a stake in the behavior of others. No man is an island.

I’m not a social media addict, I only use HN occasionally and really only to remind myself what other people are like. Without this I would forget and assume things about people that are just not true. I treat social media like the dangerous drug that it is and intentionally limit my exposure. But not everyone can do that. I personally know many people who have let social media ruin their lives and their minds to the point I’m not even sure they are rehabilitatable.

I wasn’t proposing a ban, I don’t trust the government with that much power and regulation would be difficult- at what point does a social club become social media. I guess my appeal to time travel did not properly reflect this perceived futility.

I think the only way would be as an Amish like intentional community with a religious level of enforcement. E.g. You can use social media but only in the shed, not in the house. But that’s not realistic so I just have to accept that X% of the population are not going to make it unscathed. These people will become a burden on the state at a time when the state is increasingly reaching to voluntary euthanasia for solutions. Perhaps in time people will socially and genetically evolve in ways that’ll be able to deal with it.

I think ageism is one of the last safe hold outs for those who like to participate in "isms" outside their echo chambers.

I’m against protected class laws and I am for accepting reality and making public policy based on that reality. It is just my view that social media is unhealthy at any age.

I think there is a better argument for banning anyone under the age of 30 from voting than there is for anything as low as a limit of 60 for voting.

So as a compromise only allow people between 30 and 60 to vote?

(Which would be hilarious, as it means, allmost no one voted in office would be allowed to vote themself anymore, unless of course that would change, too)

On the flip side, it seems evident that younger people tend to vote for the betterment of all, while older people tend to shift toward voting for «themselves».

Why is that evident? Any evidence for it?

I’m talking of the typical left/right split. Where leftist policies tend toward redistribution of wealth to the benefit of broader swathes, while right oriented policies tend to at least lead to more concentration of wealth. Maybe it is an outdated bias, but until now at least my impression is that young people have had a greater tendency toward some form of humanistic idealism.

That's the traditional stereotype, but I have a hard time believing those whose internet presence is mostly manifested as Twitter stan wars and tiktok trends care about greater ideals than the next viral trend

>I’m talking of the typical left/right split. Where leftist policies tend toward redistribution of wealth to the benefit of broader swathes

Broader swathes which they're part of. This is just the millennia old has and has-nots, don't fall for wishful thinking this base.

It’s just different forms of selfishness. Many young adults on the left voting for free shit from the government are voting for it because they would get it. They don’t actually care about the VA or whatever other stuff they don’t qualify for.

Then they get decent paying jobs and vote for the party that gets rid of the programs they no longer qualify for in order to reduce their taxation.

Not true; young, childless people don't think about the next generation, because why would they? It's game-theory optimal for them to maximize laws which benefit them personally, as they don't have to worry about their children growing up with the consequences.

Frankly, society would be a lot better if the childless couldn't vote; leave voting to people who have a stake in society's future!

(And yes, adoption counts, doesn't need to be biological -- not excluding anyone here.)

Maybe idealism is dead and even the youth have been corrupted these days.

>Frankly, society would be a lot better if the childless couldn't vote; leave voting to people who have a stake in society's future!

Whoa now. Just because I am childless doesn’t mean I don’t care about future generations. I still have friends and family that do have children and I vote with that in mind.

Hard to tell whether you are being sarcastic or not; just in case you aren't, it's trivial to confirm that few people vote in a game-theory optimal manner.

>I think there is a better argument for banning anyone under the age of 30 from voting

Please expand on this.

This is akin to speed limits. Doing 50 km/h on a 20 km/h street isn't going to kill you, but can kill people outside your vehicle.

and in advanced age there is cognitive decline

the median seventy-five year old’s brain is not in the same condition as the median thirty year old’s

75 and 60 are vastly different.

It doesn't matter because the 35 year old isn't using his brain to vote anyway. He's just going by what social media, the news, and peer pressure leads him to. If anything, an older person has better established understanding of the world even if they're not better at working things out.

Anecdotally the elderly in my life vote far more off of vibes than my immediate social circle does. You could say it’s a bubble or bias, but it’s the difference between coherent programs and policy decisions vs “anti-freedom” or “socialism”

You actually know people who vote because of the programs and policies the candidates are expected to implement? I know people often pretend to but from what I've seen, it's always just the ones that the media has told them to think about and only used to justify favoring whoever they've already chosen anyway. I don't think it's even reasonable to expect voters to pay attention to such details because there are too many for everyone to be an expert on but if they vote based on broad philosophies like freedom or socialism, they can expect the politicians will make the many small decisions that more-or-less align with that.

If at “over 60 you can do adult things”, why do we take their drivers licenses away from and make them sit a drivers test every year unlike adults under 60?

They don’t take their license away, they just test more frequently to watch for deterioration of vision, etc.

Also, people under 60 still need to test and qualify for a license. So I’m not sure why you went down this comparison route.

Because it's in society's best interest not to have impaired people driving; whether it's due to substances taken, illness or age.

Banning those over 60 is a funny jab against an older generation who are susceptible to conspiracy theories and who are not media smart. They have lots of trouble differentiating sound and noise. I doubt this person was serious. Nevertheless, it was funny.

The young are also susceptible to conspiracy theories. You don't get "media smart" by browsing Tiktok and Instagram, which is all they know how to do.

Countries around the world need to bite the bullet and implement that for voting too.

Voting rights should be proportional to remaining quality-adjusted life years remaining based on life expectancy.

I am joking of course, but there is something to ponder about the growing number of childless people over 40 voting with little concern for the long term.

As a childless person over 40, wtf are you talking about?

People don't all vote purely on self-interest, some of us vote on how we think human society should be run, and what we think is genuinely best for everyone. Not just for our own immediate bottom line.

This whole ageist line of reasoning is pretty offensive.

It’s not ageism so much as they are prejudiced against people not raising children.

We childless folk have had a quiet 25ish years and now the pendulum seems to be swinging back the other direction. I’ve noticed quite an uptick in memes about childless people being selfish monsters and taking away our voting rights is right in line with that.

Doesn’t really matter when the percentage of childless adults is growing every year. I just scoff and move on.

Exceptio probat regulam.

No, I don't believe I am particularly an exception, I believe you're just exhibiting prejudice.

Yes, not a snowflake for sure, but as you say "people don't all vote purely on self-interest" but most do.

I'm not sure that's particularly true.

And it still doesn't come close to justifying taking away someone's input to democracy. I find all these discussions massively distasteful.

Also short-sighted because they tend to assume that the age cohort making the claim have more stake in the future, are all of one mind, are thinking long term themselves, or are generally going to do things better. None of these things hold up to much scrutiny AFAICT.

Claims about "all" are not useful and a distraction from useful understanding of human behaviour. People, like any animal, as a rule, act largely on self-interest. That is with a broad definition of self that includes family --specially offsprings, and larger "identities" like clan, village, city, country, race, creed, religion, and so on.

> That is with a broad definition of self that includes family --specially offsprings, and larger "identities" like clan, village, city, country, race, creed, religion, and so on.

In which case the entire conversation is moot.

Old people with children vote for policies that favor their specific children.

Old people without children vote for policies that favor the next generation.

No one cares about a race without a horse in it.

It's hard to stay polite in discussions where people use the guise of irony to say things they know they shouldn't. You have no evidence for your proposal, and I bet you can't even argue why it would be a net positive, without resorting to prejudice.

In case you couldn't quite parse that, I mean: fuck your comment.

How's that?

Here's a crazy thought maybe it's not actually fascism.

Which of the characteristics do you not think Trump embodies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

It seems pretty text book to me.

> characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,

Well none of those, so why don’t you explain which ones since they are so obvious to you.

Have you ever read "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"?

Militarism and ‘strong regimentation of society’ are two that very obviously don’t apply to Trumpian politics. Trump was an isolationist militarily in his first term - an expansionist nationalist military is a sine qua non of fascism.

And Trump’s fetish for deregulation works against the second one.

> Fascism rejects the view that violence is inherently negative or pointless but rather views imperialism, political violence, and war as means to national rejuvenation

Trump has advocated for nationalist, North Korean style military parades and the use of the military against protesters etc. And there this myth of him being anti-interventionist but America was very active in Syria during his term.

I think you are conflating nationalism and fascism.

Nationalism has a lot of gradations, and while it can be a subset of fascism it isn't inherently fascistic. Fukuyama said: "But it is not clear that nationalism represents an irreconcilable contradiction in the heart of liberalism. In the first place, nationalism is not one single phenomenon but several, ranging from mild cultural nostalgia to the highly organized and elaborately articulated doctrine of National Socialism."

And using the military against mobs of people that are ransacking cities is not under any construction 'fascism' - property rights are after all pretty important in the Western Anglo-Saxon tradition and using force to protect property rights is not 'fascism'.

Not sure what you mean by America being active militarily in Syria, either - are you referring to Trump ordering the bombing of ISIS targets? By that logic when Obama ordered the Navy Seals to kill bin Laden the US was engaged in a fascistic military adventure in Pakistan which... would probably make you the only person in the world to think that.

Trump is a lot of things. A fascist as that word is understood by historians is not one of them.

Then why do the people he hand-picked say it is? Should I ignore the words coming out of their mouths and pens? Should I ignore the words coming out of Trump's own mouth? Then what should I use to determine whether it's fascism or not?

That is actually a pretty interesting question, fascism doesn't seem to have any actual meaning. It is very hard to outline what a "fascist" is unless they self-identify. I thought briefly in writing this comment and I can't actually rule out Trump being a fascist, based on the fact that any policy that isn't explicitly in the liberal or communist traditions may technically be fascist.

Anyway; it has reached the point where I no longer believe people who claim Trump said something negative. Back in the 2010s I spent enough time reading up primary sources to reveal it was a misquote. Possibly a malicious misinterpretation, possibly the man just makes people so emotional that they can't listen to him for a full minute and try to interpret with a neutral lens.

He appears to be close to a saint given how much time his opponents have to spend making up stuff about him to dislike. Realistically there are a lot of real problems that people should focus on; like bad policies.

Within the past 24 hours, you said that "poisoning the blood of this country" is "Nazi rhetoric." Can you explain how both of Trump's recent usages of that "Nazi rhetoric" were misquoted?

Literally all the links provided were nbcnews.com. As far as I'm concerned there may as well be no evidence at all that Trump said it. They may be reliable on other topics but they aren't a credible source of reporting on what Trump says. Like I said, I followed up on that sort of thing in the 2010s and by now I'm happy to just ignore them as discredited.

As far as I'm aware Trump was running on deporting illegal immigrants. He's not planning on gassing anyone. Except maybe with all the hot air he blows, heh.

The NBC News links gave sources. Here they are:

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1115931494299...

https://youtu.be/RKPFjAhd3KQ

And even in 40 seconds of context, what do we get? He's not planning on gassing the Jews. He's not advocating rolling back democracy. He's not even talking about invading Russia (something of a rarity these days). He is, in fact, talking about that wall of his that has made the press so much for the last 8 years. Between that and bumping abortion from a Federal to State jurisdiction we may indeed be dealing with Hitler reborn.

He represents the faction of US politics that wants to enforce a secure border and his rhetoric is ugly. That is pretty normal for anti-migration rhetoric, by the way. It makes him nasty, maybe even cruel, but not a fascist.

This is why it is a waste of time trying to follow up NBC News articles. They're distracting from a real issue (migration, border security, what have you) with ... I don't even know how to characterise it. Abuse to try and shut people up, perhaps. Playing silly gotcha games, maybe. That quote isn't Trump trying to revive Nazi policies, as we all might have expected from the outset.

How is immigration poisoning the blood of this country tho?

What did Trump mean by that?

You mentioned Russia, the wall, NBC and typed a lot but didn't really answer the question.

> You mentioned Russia, the wall, NBC and typed a lot but didn't really answer the question.

Fair enough, let me be direct: I think the question is stupid and I'm not going to answer it. Trump has spent 4 years in office and run multiple election campaigns that have featured potentially hundreds of hours of coverage of Trump, his policies and opportunities to evaluate them.

With that in the background, old mate wants to discuss a tweet and 40 second clip, probably bought into the conversation by institutions that specialises in lying about what Trump says and taking clips out of context given that NBC News is involved.

And like I said, back in the 2010s fair enough it is a topic to discuss because who knows? Maybe he is Hitler. But it is now 2024, there isn't anything there and the people bringing it up are looking increasingly isolated and unhinged by virtue of crying wolf. Trump says mean things about immigrants. Everyone knows. He doesn't represent a return of the Nazi party, even if a lot of people don't like him or think he is a bad candidate.

> Fair enough, let me be direct: I think the question is stupid and I'm not going to answer it.

So you can't answer it.

> probably bought into the conversation by institutions that specialises in lying about what Trump says

Nope, he said it 4 times in 2023 alone and many many times since. In an interview with a right leaning website, in a rally in New Hampshire, and quite literally in the Truth Social post linked above, straight from Trump himself. No pesky journalists or reporters to misquote.

So hopefully we can agree he has said it, not out of context, multiple times.

What did Hitler say?

"All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning"

"Whenever Aryans have mingled their blood with that of an inferior race, the result has been the downfall of the people who were the standard-bearers of a higher culture,"

Going back to Trump's quote, what type of blood do you think he was referring to?

Do you think he meant the immigrants were going to literally inject poison into Americans as some kind of terrorist attack?

So the goalposts moved from you no longer believe he said something negative (he very clearly did) to him not planning on gassing the Jews.

Yes, it's distracting from the real issues, but his supporters don't care that he torpedoed the bipartisan border control bill either.

These quotes aren't about his proposals to roll back democracy, and I never claimed they were. Rolling back democracy is more about his actions to gain absolute presidential immunity.

To be clear, I don't think Trump is fascist like Hitler. He is fascist like Putin. He wants autocracy for personal enrichment, not for extermination of undesirables. He uses Hitler's rhetoric because it works, and he admires Hitler for his crowds, not because Hitler would kill the man who married his favorite daughter.

In my opinion, Hitler would still be Hitler if he targeted Muslims, Algerians or redheads. The choice of target group isn't important,nor was the precise method of murder - the thing that makes Hitler Hitler was that he tried to kill a whole group.

Fascism has a meaning like high-level language has a meaning. Yet if I point to a language like Java, you have plenty of ways to argue it's actually low-level if you're motivated to argue that.

I think leopards are the animal you're looking for here.

Dingoes mate

Even better, how about <16 to >16?

I've always been a supporter of those, my view on democracy is not to be mature enough, but to be a part of society with needs and ideas, school students neee to be represented because they're part of a society

How about we only allow those who have our same ideas? That's great for democracy, true democratic values

Stupid, snarky comment intended to create division, that belongs in a trash heap like Reddit or Twitter, not here.

We have evidence that social media harms children. As in, studies.

We don't have any studies showing that old people harm society using social media or whatever this vaguely ageist snark is saying.

> We don't have any studies showing that old people harm society using social media

an an american who just watched the recent election go down, I have to strongly disaagree with this.

That's obviously a biased statement. I happen to share your bias toward the election outcome, but I'm afraid analysis shows that GenZ has moved towards Republican in comparison with similar aged voters 4 and 8 years ago, while people over 60 have moved towards Dems. So your assumptions are not correct, apart from the fact that they're not even relevant to the discussion about the influence of social media (and mobile phones) on young people.

How can you justify that view? Harris lost because of voter turnout. I don't see how >60s are to blame for that. I also don't see how >60s are to be blamed for young people moving right.

> I also don't see how >60s are to be blamed for young people moving right.

Rebelling against the perceived establishment as presented to them by their teachers (some of whom are that old) probably had something to do with it. (Their parents too, but their parents aren't >60)

Young men particularly have been getting dosed with idpol messaging about men by their predominantly female teachers from a young age. Anecdotally, there's also a general thing where the older a teacher gets the more embittered by experience they become, and they become more likely to fall into negative behavior patterns like having "nemesis students" they like to pick on, or exhibiting flagrant bias in the classroom against an entire gender.

Yes, after years and years, we only recently have solid studies showing that social media harms individual children. I expect it’ll take a bit longer to finalize studies showing the harm to society.

And maybe once they exist it'll make sense to impose additional limitations on social media.

The overriding drive should be to make policy decisions based on strong evidence, not on sentiment. If that means we wait a bit longer then we wait a bit longer.

> Older adults are relatively more susceptible to impulsive social influence than young adults

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-024-00134-0

The number of test subjects is small, but hopefully this will lead to more funding for larger projects.

>Stupid, snarky comment intended to create division, that belongs in a trash heap like Reddit or Twitter, not here.

This also doesn’t belong here.

Hot take: most reddit discussions are every bit as good as HN comments. There is no need to make HN "not Reddit".

Do you attribute the Trump victory to people over 60? What about German right wing parties? I assume similar can be found in the U.S., but I did not have time:

https://www.nzz.ch/english/why-are-young-germans-voting-for-...

The most insane left culture warriors who wanted to relive a second spring on the other hand are indeed approaching or over 60. Fake culture warriors like Pelosi and Biden are over 80.

Fake culture warriors in software organizations like Python are approaching or over 60. You know, the exact same people who read Ayn Rand and supported ESR when it was politically expedient for their careers 20 years ago, because they always go with the herd, no matter how stupid it is.

These culture warriors, through their purges and insane statements, have so thoroughly destroyed any trust in the Democrats that there is a landslide victory for Trump now. It will take years to restore that confidence.

The claim is that it protects the mental health and welfare of young people. Young people have special protection from the law in many regards including sexual consent, contracts, employment etc.

A 60 year old is expected to have the capacity to make informed choices. Whether they do is down to personal responsibility. Many of us will be 60 one day.

What sort of positive effect would you expect?

What do you think is wrong with people over 60?

Thats too simple.

The problem is that a lot of democracies have a demography skewed towards old people and at the same time a simple majority can dictate over s.th. like a minority of 30% of the voters.