I think the concern about how this will be implemented (e.g. selfie and ID submission) is well-founded. I also think that letting tech companies make billions by feeding our youth mental junk food is a problem. I'm not sure where the middle path is, but I think it'll need some real thought to figure out.

If you didn’t realize that making teens verify their age online meant that everyone had to verify their age and identity online, that’s just a dangerous level of stupidity.

The issue is everyone wants some quick and easy solution when the truth is we’re going to need to get much more intentional as a society about this. Take phone bans. Everyone wants to ban phones from schools/classrooms, but the truth is in a lot of places phones are already banned from school. But we’ve spent the last 3 decades taking away any power from teachers to enforce their rules so kids just do it anyway.

There are zero knowledge proof systems that nobody would have a problem with because nobody ever knows who is accessing the content, only that they are allowed or not.

Ironic to call people aware of this stupid.

Zero knowledge proofs don't matter, these verification systems already exist and they require you to show live video of your face to confirm you're the actual living person that matches your credentials.

You could have a completely anonymous tech solution to this, but it doesn't matter, because platforms and governments want video proof of life and identity, and they want to keep the data.

Don't ignore the context of this discussion.

Someone just said anyone who believes in privacy and content restrictions is stupid. Except those two concepts are compatible.

The context of this discussion is political realities of censorship, an area where your theoretical proof of compatibility means nothing.

Since I live in America I should give up on climate change and healthcare and childcare and housing and all forms of protections of rights, because our internal beliefs and goals at all times must always be a reflection of the state of the real world.

You can't hope or advocate for a better future? That's silly.

They are not compatible with political reality. Hate to beat on a cliche, but this is a classic example of the "tech solution to a political problem" trope.

There's always smart ways to do things. The government will choose the cheapest and hire the most generic IT consulting firm to do it which won't get close. Or if they don't do it themselves, they'll just fine big companies unless they follow an overbearing and forever expanding checklist of requirements where the companies lawyers will be forced to choose the most extreme options or risk exposure.

Meanwhile kids will use VPNs, browser extensions, ID spoofing, piracy, etc will become the norm to bypass it and law abiding adults (including good parents and people without kids) will be burdened with the results.

The parent called people stupid. That was uncalled for and I'm educating them.

I don't support these policies myself.

> There are zero knowledge proof systems that nobody would have a problem with because nobody ever knows who is accessing the content, only that they are allowed or not.

If you truly believed that this was going to be the solution that governments were going to use, yes you’re still an idiot. Ok, maybe incredibly naive to be charitable. But still have you paid even the slightest bit of attention pretty much any governmental institution has done in the last 15 years?

And anyone who believes in universal healthcare? Idiot. Voting rights and holidays? Idiot. Civil rights? Idiot. Want to stop climate change, damn, idiot.

Wow, so intellectual you are to say nobody can hold ideals.

What you’re defending is people willingly giving up their own freedoms because they got outraged over something they read on the internet.

And instead of owning up to that fact, saying “oh no, but that’s not what I expected, I expected these laws to affect someone else, not me”.

What on earth is this response

They're repeatedly calling people idiots (despite not understanding the topic at hand) and saying nobody can hold ideology if it cannot be implemented immediately in a political climate. What am I supposed to respond with?

Zero knowledge proofs won't be zero knowledge in practice when organizations the size of governments are involved. They want a backdoor on your devices too (or already have one).

But that's not related? Google already knows when you watch porn through Chrome on an Android, but it's not related to age verification.

zk-SNARK would have worked for age verification while remaining anonymous.

Because ZKPs aren't the whole system.

If it allows regular checking (and they all basically have to), I can determine someone's exact birth date when they become an adult. If a system allows me specifying an age to check (as many do), then I can determine anyone's birth date.

Further the vast majority of people do not understand ZKPs. If some random website asks them to go verify their age by installing software or going to a website that requires them to upload an ID, a good percentage will simply balk. The fear of lack of privacy, regardless of actual privacy, creates a major chilling effect on speech.

The truly galling part is that all of this nonsense only exists because parents won't spend a couple minutes setting up parental control software. For goodness sake, it takes 30 seconds to turn on a filter that blocks all porn on the screen on an iPhone. I have little doubt that if governments required it - or simply paid for it, they could get apple/microsoft/google/etc to modify their parental control software to detect social media as well.

I agree with you, the blocks being done are neither needed nor implemented ethically.

> If you didn’t realize that making teens verify their age online meant that everyone had to verify their age and identity online, that’s just a dangerous level of stupidity.

And it is completely unnecessary in many cases. There are many cases where a third party cannot give access to something to a minor, but the parent is able to give consent anyway. So give parents the tools they need to tell online services, "hey, this is a child so act accordingly" rather than having the government enter the loop. For example: a web browser can ask the operating system for an age verification token, then relay that token to the website. Given that most operating systems these days have the notion of privilege and most operating systems make it difficult for unauthorized users to gain administrative privileges, it should be reasonably secure.

Of course, there are going to be weaknesses in such a system. On the other hand, there are going to be weaknesses to any system. There are also going to be situations where that level of protection is inadequate, but we're talking about access to controlled substances levels of concern here rather than kids getting access to age inappropriate videos. And chances are it doesn't have to be 100% effective anyhow. It just has to be effective enough to discourage people from targeting minors with age inappropriate content.

It's only unnecessary if you assume the goal is actually protecting children, as opposed to entrenching even more data collection and identity tracking.

> I'm not sure where the middle path is, but I think it'll need some real thought to figure out.

Bans on recommendation systems. Doesn't need much thought to figure out. Instant 90% harm reduction.

But they do have genuine discovery utility, the issue is more of having them tuned for engagement above all else.

Heroin also has genuine medical utility.

> People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. They'll have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. We all will.

I guess I'm fine with not visiting any of these age-restricted sites. They're not the thing I would miss if the whole internet shut down. (In fact, there's precious little I would miss — maybe just archive.org?)

He said, on an online forum.

Sure, ha ha. But I was talking about things I would miss.

If "save the children" creates enough friction to bring the demise of social media then I'll go lay a flower on Anita Bryant's grave and tell her I'm sorry.

It's going to be every website. There will be no place they will stop. You think a forum like this one where it's conceivably possible someone in a bad category could interact with someone under the age of 16, however unlikely, won't be regulated?

"But sir! The largest websites on the internet implement Government ID Age Check. Just federate with one of those, why are you complaining so much? Don't you want to protect the children or stop anti-Semitism or something?"

You might be exaggerating the dangers a bit I think, but I'm not disagreeing with you.

I'm kind of a hard sell though because I think sometimes that life before there was an internet was preferable.

To be sure, like anyone, I can think of plenty of positives that the internet has brought. But as a net positive? I'm increasingly having my doubts.

yep. the whole purpose of this is to stop people from communicating with each other, and only consume approved vetted sources. they'd probably prefer to keep tech out of people's hands entirely (why would serfs need that?!?), but it is too useful for the purposes of surveillance and control.

When I mentioned that any attempt at identifying users to access or write content is a trojan horse for a wide surveillance yet HN users downvoted and flagged such comments and were zealously supportive of "prottecct kidz"

In the late 90s and early 2000s we as teenagers had access to unfiltered internet and unregulated. The harm to us were largely moral fanaticism, this was when they also tried to ban video games because of violent content and now we have complete censorship and control over what games can sell or not on steam.

Much of the panic on social media amplified by protestants and religious ppl are greatly exaggerated. Porn isnt the danger its the addictive tendencies of the individual that must be educated upon.

Yep. This feels a lot like a repeat of the moral panic from the early eras, only this time the policies are unfortunately within the overton window instead of outside, and have shown to be popular outside of tech circles.

We beat the moral panic last time and kept our freedoms. This time I'm not so certain that we will prevail, there seems to be a coordinated/unified effort on this wide spread surveillance and my hunch tells me the rise of authoritarianism around the world is the drive - much easier to oppress a population in a surveillance state. The "for the children" argument is as old as time.

> In the late 90s and early 2000s we as teenagers had access to unfiltered internet and unregulated. The harm to us were largely moral fanaticism, this was when they also tried to ban video games because of violent content and now we have complete censorship and control over what games can sell or not on steam.

I get your point but I don't agree.

I mean, politicians back then were actually right in assuming that danger looms on the Internet. They just were completely wrong about what was the danger. Everyone and their dog thought that the danger was porn, violent video games (Columbine and Erfurt certainly didn't help there), gore videos (anyone 'member RottenCom), shocker sites (RIP Goatse), more porn, oh and did I say they were afraid of boobs? Or even of cars "shaking" when you picked up a sex worker in GTA and parked in a bush?

What they all missed though was the propaganda, the nutjobs, the ability of all the village idiots of the entire world that were left to solitude by society to now organize, the drive of monetization. That's how we got 4chan which began decent (Project Chanology!) but eventually led to GamerGate, 8chan and a bunch of far-right terrorists; social media itself fueled lynch mobs, enabled enemy states to distribute propaganda at a scale never before seen in the history of humanity and may or may not have played a pivotal role in many a regime change (early Twitter, that was a time...); and now we got EA and a whole bunch of free to play mobile games shoving microtransactions down our children's throats. Tetris of all things just keeps shoving gambling ads in your face after each level. The kids we're not gonna lose to far-right propaganda, we're gonna lose to fucking casinos.

We should have brought down the hammer hard on all of that crap instead of wasting our energy on trying to prevent teenagers from having a good old fashioned wank.

Sounds like you just want to censor political views and only be seen content that your government wants you to see.

I agree. To the downvoters: do you mind elaborating?

I largely agree with you but this bill is touted as a social media bill.

The internet was somewhat social in the 90's and early 2000's.

The institutions largely being affected here did not exist then.

> it's needing to submit a selfie and ID photo to be verified, saved, and permanently bound to your every single action online.

And leaked every 6 months, now including your ID photos and real name instead of an internet pseudonym, and lots of other sweet details that make extortion schemes a child's play

It would be cool if the post office could issue you an ID card, but for a pseudonym of your own choosing, so that when the data leaks, you can just trash it and get a new one. You could just show the dude at the post office your real id and he can check the age, but not actually write it down or link the two identities digitally.

Even cooler would be if you create a different identity for each service so when they do leak, you know who leaked it. My first id would be for John Facebook Doe.

> but not actually write it down or link the two identities digitally

What is to stop you just selling the ID card with zero consequences? Unless it has a photo on it of course, in which case that itself is an identifier you can't easily rotate.

Better is to use zero-knowledge cryptography to prove that you have a real ID's private key in your possession. Leaking the private key would be the same as giving away your real identity. Now you could make a proxy service that generates the proofs for money without it being traced back to you - but maybe a countermeasure to limit but not eradicate abuse would be for the protocol to include a proof you haven't used the same real identity to prove your age on that service in at least x days (that does mean you could be tracked for x days until you prove your age under another pseudonym).

There are zero consequences when you get a friend to buy you alcohol or cigarettes, I think this will be much the same.

Why would you assume these 2 groups of people are the same...?

I love this.

I would like to note that I am probably grossly unqualified to talk about such topics, but one idea that I've had rolling around is that inevitably, if you ask people "should kids be able to watch/read/be exposed to [insert adult thing here]" they will inevitably say no of course not. I feel like this is pretty reasonable. For advocates of privacy to succeed I believe that they will need to not just oppose censorship on a global scale, but provide solutions. One thing that technology has not changed is the unit of human relations. From foster care to single or two parents, the idea of a family is still there in society. In my opinion, this group is greatly underserved, and I do not believe it is enough to say "its the parents responsibility" to curate content. That is a full time job. Now, I will be the first to say that children do not at all need to have a smarphone/ipad/etc until they are in their teens, restricting all technology use can be hard. There needs to be tools that allow parents to choose what their children are allowed to be exposed to. Some parents will choose complete freedom, some will choose some "censorship." But I believe the power should rest in the hands of the parents, and I am strongly opposed to the government dictating this choice. I believe one thing the government can be good at is enforcing standards and providing reference implementations that would allow such curation to be possible. Imagine if you walk into an Apple store and say you are buying a phone for your child, and they tell you: would you like a side of censorship with that? Or if companies like youtube that are a platform with children would need to provide a means for them to be curated, for channels and features to be blocked, etc. I am not sure if what I am proposing is the right way forward but I would love to see governments tackle this problem of giving power back to the parents, instead of seeing governments attempt to enforce their worldviews onto others. I am also interested in how there would a handoff, from a "child-friendly" internet to a fully uncensored one within families. I believe that outright rejecting censorship of what children can access will do nothing to assuage the fears of people that do not want their children accessing random websites, and that a solution that keeps the power in the hands of the people and not the government is needed.

Please use paragraphs.

I think a practical problem with this is that even if you offer this tech you will inevitably get groups of parents insisting the government use this power enforce their values on the other parents as a matter of course. We see this already with the erosion of cultural norms for free speech.

> It's disgusting that <id-verify-service> is willing to support the consumption of <lewd-video-game>.

<<id-verify-service threatens to pull service from store, lewd-game is removed>

> It's disgusting that <id-verify-service> is willing to support the consumption of <trans-dating-sim-video-game>.

<<...>>

Apple already provides heaps of tools to help moderate what children can do on the phones, you can limit apps screen times and disable some apps altogether.

People want these laws simply because its hard to say no to your kids, and it's a lot easier to tell your kids its the governments fault they can't use social media any more.

Requiring photo IDs is not the only solution. Things don't have to be implemented that way. I can be both for privacy in this case and limits on social media. Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging. Essentially a signed timestamp + random number.

> People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted.

This is BS and not productive. We can do better.

> Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site

Which “gov site”? Registering for voting does not give you an electronic log in of any kind.

Not that poster but since Covid, most people have a registration on the MyGov app that handles medicare, tax etc. You could easily add a one-time token mechanism to that app

My gov id. I'm not saying that there's currently a registration online for voting, but that since you're required to register anyway, the system exists that can be extended to generating those tokens.

And realistically, most people do have mygov id already.

> most people do have mygov id

It was renamed myid, and less than half of all Australians use it.

> no logging

If you think that the AIC/NIC doesn't have its tentacles in there already, then I have a bridge to sell you.

It was almost exactly half last year. The number will only go up.

I'm not sure what you mean by the logging part. Yes they can either log or not log it. The system can be designed for either. If your default position is "government will always lie given the chance" that's fine I guess. But then you need to assume they're monitoring your ISP anyway.

There needs to be some terms clarified. mygov vs mygovid vs myid.

Agreed, "myid" used to be called "mygovid".

But myid/mygovid is NOT mygov. I'm guessing the rename is likely because of that confusion.

mygov usage is high, 26 million accounts, according to [1] 2023 report.

Myid usage seems middling. 13 million according to [2] 2024 article.

Which platform to use for what and how I leave to you.

I don't want this. I don't want the government's aim for auditable provability of every item watched/interacted with in the name of "won't somebody think of the children!!!" level of authoritarianism.

There are plenty of households without kids. Why are they having to pay a privacy price?

[0] https://my.gov.au/en/about/help/digital-id

[1] https://my.gov.au/content/dam/mygov/documents/audit/response...

[2] https://www.ato.gov.au/media-centre/mygovid-being-renamed-my...

I agree the naming is a mess. There is the Australian Digital ID system (https://www.digitalidsystem.gov.au/how-the-system-works) which allows third party providers.

Whatever the capabilities of the Australian government ID services, there is a way to issue privacy-preserving tokens that could do all the things you'd need without being trackable the system was properly designed. (I have not studied the protocols of the Digital ID spec to say whether that's the case).

I agree with you that technically it can be done. Which is why I said:

"I don't want the government's aim for auditable provability"

I mean, technically they could do it and provide at least a modicum of privacy protection. But I will bet they won't because whoever is implementing it will want to be able to point to specifics - specific people, specific times, specific places - so they can cover their arse come the next moral panic moment.

So instead of using a photo ID so that everything is logged, register your every interaction online with the government directly. The government which also has your photo ID on record.

There's zero difference. Either way, the government will have you monitoring your every single little comment online and having it forever tied to your person. And that'll have a chilling effect on individual liberties.

> So instead of using a photo ID so that everything is logged, register your every interaction online with the government directly.

Not just register, but ask permission for and give the government a veto on.

No, not every interaction. Given a token without user id, companies can check it's valid without contacting any government service and without knowing your identity.

And then the government sees where those tokens are used and they can easily monitor your every action, and revoke your ability to use certain sites if they don't like what you're saying.

North Korea wishes they came up with an idea this good.

Signature schemes can be validated without the signers involvement. No tokens need to go back to the government

And they do this over a network we know governments are constantly spying on?

This scenario doesn't make sense. Either govs can spy on your traffic and see everything (and don't need tokens for spying), or they can't and wouldn't be able to see the token. There's no scenario for: they can only spy on their tokens in your traffic.

Because it's possible to protect yourself against that with anonymity. That goes out the window the moment tokens tied to your real identity get involved.

Not to mention that it's likely they wouldn't be able to spy on absolutely everything you do, just parts of it. The tokens would be an obvious point of interest.

On top of that, it's probably a lot easier for the government to justify this kind of spying. They could probably twist information about token use as being some kind of "metadata", therefore "okay to spy on".

> give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging

Awful idea.

This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication by deciding that you're no longer allowed to verify with these platforms.

"Been protesting the wrong things? Been talking about the wrong war crimes? Been advocating for the wrong LGBT policies? Failed to pay child support? Failed to pay back-taxes? Sorry you're no longer eligible for authenticating with social media services. You're too dangerous."

That is not beyond the pale for the Australian government.

You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part, with absolutely no mechanism to verify that. And it can be changed at any time, in targeted ways, again with no way for you to know.

A better idea would be to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash. An even better idea is to not do any of this and spend the money on a campaign to educate parents and institutions on how to use existing parental controls.

> This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication

They already can in the ID scenarios. Since they issue IDs.

> You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part

That's part of the equation. To be tracked, two parties have to fail: the issuing side needs to log the details and the verifying side needs to log the details, and then agree to share them when they don't have to. There are existing laws that would enable this in simpler ways.

> to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash.

What you mean is: share your ID details with those places repeatedly and require people to travel to them from remote areas (there's lots of places where that would mean a day trip at least). I'm not sure that's better. Also making that process time-limited would be really costly.

> An even better idea is to not do any of this

Sure, but that's not the scenario we're in anymore.

> so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging. Essentially a signed timestamp + random number

The trivial workaround is for people to create ad supported websites to hand out those tokens.

If there’s no logging then they can’t determine who’s abusing it or if they’ve even generated a different token recently, so people can generate and hand out all the tokens they want.

So then the goalposts move again, and now there’s some logging in this hypothetical solution to prevent abuse, but of course this means we’ve arrived at the situation where accessing any website first requires everyone to do a nice little logged handshake with the government to determine if they have permission. What could go wrong?

The real workaround is for people (including kids) to buy themselves a VPN subscription for a couple bucks per month and leave all of this behind while the old people are letting jumping through hoops.

The proposal is for SIGNED tokens i.e. only the govt can issue them, and you need a govt issued ID to generate them. The latter mechanism allows rate limiting. This fixes the problem you outline.

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety

The case study of Bukele in El Salvador shows why this is naive. Low safety directly caused low liberty, because voters care about safety more than liberty, due to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Delivering safety is a necessary condition for preserving liberty. It is not a nuisance or a side quest.

The simple answer to these situations is usually that it's not the same people complaining in both instances. I see similar things in places with anonymous posting where people assume everyone was in agreement on x, then later they hear something different and try to frame it like a flip-flop or a gotcha. People are never all in agreement.

To add to that, often no news is good news, or rather people won't bother posting about how they're glad minors can use social media freely, but once restrictions are in place they will quickly complain (because they prefer the old way).

>it's not the same people complaining in both instances

I just learned a brand-new term for this: It's called the "Goomba Fallacy"[1]

[1]https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

> The term references an Internet meme depicting the fallacy using Goombas, which was first posted to Twitter by @supersylvie_ on January 29, 2024.

The history of this term goes back… one year? (from a rather unpopular meme) I’m all for introducing new vocab in english but it feels like there should already be a term for this.

Maybe “population fallacy”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy ?

Funny enough, searching "goomba fallacy" in wikipedia's search yields [association fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy) and it appears to be more accurate. (Also, what I assume to be semantic search hitting that article from that search is amusing and more than a little telling.)

The population fallacy is when one infers information about an individual from the group, which wasn't done here as there is no specific individual in question. The population fallacy is seeing that some demographic likes to do a thing more than other demographics and thinking therefore any given subject in that demographic likes to do that thing.

That's brilliant. I suppose the same issue exists in polling and politics in general. You can't please all of the people all of the time.

The renaming tactic used is much more interesting and useful than the fallacy

Someone the two groups never meet in one thread. Somehow they are all afraid to voice their points when the other group is speaking.

It is something worth pointing out.

The issue I have is this is all for naught. All it does is make things more complicated.

Some with kids will praise and use it as intended. Many with kids won't. Those without kids won't. All in return for the ultimate in monitoring.

And then people will work around it in various ways. Use forums or chat-group apps that don't comply with the law as intended. Share videos in other ways.

This whole shebang is pointless for enforcement and scary for authoritarianism - worst of both worlds.

> A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids.

The common theme in these statements is that people see “social media” as something that other people consume.

All of these calls for extreme regulations share the same theme: The people calling for them assume they won’t be impacted. They think only other people consuming other content on other sites will be restricted or inconvenienced, so they don’t care about the details.

Consider how often people on Hacker News object when you explain that Hacker News is a social media site. Many people come up with their own definition of social media that excludes their preferred social sites and only includes sites they don’t use.

Until about the age of 12 banning inappropriate media and people that carry such is the sole responsibility of the parents. Between 12 and 16 there is an interraction with the child and afterwards the teen goes by theirself. The same goes for social relations, education, every life choice.

No silly age IDs and selfies, no unstable and unsafe procedures, no permanent damage.

Of course they are angry. People only love govt intervention when they think it won't affect them. Us vs them mentality is everywhere these days. Even when them is our own children.

From here in Australia, nobody was really asking for this here.

Best I can tell it came from a single but sustained pressure campaign by one of the Murdoch newspapers.

Then the Government gamed some survey polling to make it look like there was support for it (asking questions that assumed an impossible perfect system that could magically block under-16s with no age verification for adults). Still, over 40% of parents said that 15s and under should be able to access Facebook and Instagram, and over 75% of parents said they should be able to access YouTube, but the Government was acting like 95% of people were for blocking them, when it was closer to 50% of parents.

>From here in Australia, nobody was really asking for this here.

Government in australia is about being seen to be busy. Give them an idea that cant be morally contested, that the media wont contest, and they go about it.

Much like how we got our eSafety commissioner and internet bans. We protested them for years, but then sneaky scomo used Christchurch as wedge and got it through without protest.

And as ever, our minor parties, especially liberty minded ones are more concerned with whats in kids pants than actual liberty.

> From here in Australia, nobody was really asking for this here. > Still, over 40% of parents said that 15s and under should be able to access Facebook and Instagram

So a whopping 60% were asking for it!!!

They weren't asking for it - the small sample of parents (not a random sample of voters) agreed in principle with the impossible-in-real-life blocking with no age verification for adults system, but nobody actually really cared enough to push for it except one newspaper pressure campaign...

Yet, as I said the Government was making out like that this gamed survey meant it was basically unanimous support for a system that will require full identity/age verification for everybody (yet they’re still really trying hard to keep the ‘everybody’ bit quiet)

As an Australian living overseas, I heard about this on social media from friends / celebrities pushing for this to become a law so I disagree that no-one was asking for it.

FWIW I'm personally happy it's becoming a law

> FWIW I'm personally happy it's becoming a law

Are you going to be impacted by it?

Is it this one? How did the government game this poll?

> According to the YouGov poll, seen by the dpa news agency, some 77% of respondents said they would either "fully" or "somewhat" support similar legislation in Germany.

> People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. They'll have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. We all will.

This isn't the right way to characterise what happened. Governments are going this is unison, it is a coordinated campaign that has been obviously coming for a couple of years. Remember that governments wanted to act against misinformation? Well, this is it. Deanonymised internet. Aus, UK, US, etc - its on the way.

What you are seeing with certain comments etc is probably a lot of genuine comments primed by stories of cases where id would have apparently prevented something-or-other, along with comments from agents and bots. This is how modern governance actually works.

There is a goal (here, its deanonymised internet) then the excuse (children, porn, terrorists), then the apparent groundswell of support (supportive comments on hn, etc) then actual comments that validly complain this is dystopian but go nowhere (auto-downvoted or memory-holed by mods) which gives the appearance to most that no one really cares and this should be simply accepted. So, a difficult idea managed correctly can get past everyone with the minimum of fuss.

I still want it.

Implementing a feature and doing it in the worst and dumbest possible way are not the same thing.

That opinion still stands. But I believe that we should regulate children's access to the internet, and not the internet's access to children. As the prior does not affect adults and their free, open and private internet, while the latter absolutely does.

I believe that there should be a standard, open framework for parental control at the OS level, where parents can see a timeline of actions, and need to whitelist every new action (any new content or contact within any app). The regulation should be that children are only allowed to use such devices. Social media would then be limited to the parent-approved circles only. A minor's TikTok homepage would likely be limited to IRL friends plus some parent-approved creators, and that's exactly how it should be.

Why do you need regulation for any of that? Devices with parental controls exist already. Special browsers with parental controls exist, just for kids. Do you think Jane Smith, L3 civil servant, will do a great job of taking over product management for the entire software industry despite having a BA in English Lit and having never heard of JIRA?

There's no need for any regulations here and never was. It was always a power grab by governments and now the people who trusted the state are making surprised pikachu faces. "We didn't mean like this", they cry, whilst studiously ignoring all the people who predicted exactly this outcome.

Because most parents are oblivious to the danger, and are not taking action on their own. Meanwhile the unrestricted internet can be just as dangerous to a child's development as alcohol or drugs, if not more.

The regulation should just specify a few standards that parental controls must meet, such as the standard that every new action in any app must first be approved by a parent, and it should regulate that minors may not use or have possession of unrestricted internet devices. The actual development of that technology, and the frameworks to integrate apps with them, should definitely be up to private companies and open-source projects.

Yeah or maybe most parents don't care because they think you're wrong? Many people with young kids now grew up with the internet as kids themselves. They remember their parents going through the exact same moral panic about the internet in the mid 90s, they remember using it anyway with no restrictions whatsoever ... and they remember they grew up just fine.

When I was a kid I was logging in every night, talking to random strangers online, I even met up with a few as the years passed. Everything was fine. If you were right that it's as bad for a child's development as drink and drugs I should have ended up a burned out husk. Not only did I not, none of my friends did either and they all also had unrestricted access to the internet.

Regulations aren't the answer. They hardly ever are. Half of HN's content these days is just people being faced with the negative consequences of regulations they themselves supported and then doing a No True Socialistman meme: "good regulations haven't been tried yet!"

We can likely agree on a lot. Overregulation is bad, I don't want the government or large corporate monopolies to have more control. I also grew up with the internet and am very familiar with it, much more so than the average person. That's exactly why I'm arguing for simple regulation which gives more control and visibility to parents, and parents alone.

For example: Teenagers playing Counter Strike is most often fine. Teenagers accessing Counter Strike skin gambling websites is not. I'd say that almost all parents would agree with that, yet it still constantly happens because parents have no visibility, no way of preventing it, and most likely do not even know that their son or daughter may be lured into gambling by playing the game.

An easy solution is to limit their access to the device. If they can only use the devices in your living room when you are sitting next to them you keep full control.

Admitedly at some point they are reaching teenage years and they should have a right to privacy so even having access to a timeline of actions seems like a no go to me. The same way they can wander off in the street on their own, write private letters to people or have private calls with friends.

Definitely. I remember the era of the living room desktop PC, and that was a pretty easy and effective solution. But the primary benefit of parents giving smartphones to their kids these days is the ability to stay in contact while away from each other.

For teenagers, yeah I agree that message content and such should not be shared with the parent. The level of detail in the timeline should be configurable at the discretion of the parent. At the same time, it's also probably the most important period to shield them from harmful online content.

Kids don't really need a personal smartphone until they reach at least secondary school which put them quickly unto the early teens years.

During a transition period between 11 and 13 I applied a simple solution: smartphone stay in a drawer at home unless some communication with people is important for school work, parental control disallowed install of apps, data plan was limited to the bare minimum.

My eldest daughter is nearing 15 and now parental control has been off for a year. I can see she is not installing every dumb app possible she has a bit more liberty but screen hours is still caped and the smartphone stays out of the bedroom during the night. This is probably a rule that will sty for a while as she is sharing her bedroom with her smaller sister.

Again, rules will gradually relax with time. Key is to allows them to reach autonomy. Being divorced with the shared custody, with different rules in each household made it a bit more complicated, for example my EX didn't wanted to follow my rule of no screen time during at least a 2h time window every day where all devices are off or in a drawer, including for adults living in the household. So far I think she and her sister understand that it is OK feeling frustrated/limited and not being considered cool at school. Also that being cool at their age only gets you so far and most popular kids in my teenage years where those that ended up the worse at adulthood: early pregnancy, early addiction issues, most didn't get so far into studies and didn't have the luxury to be in a situation where they can steer their own path professionally, at least not at the extent I could. Having the example of 2 different houses, with their own mother having her own struggles help as well as sad as it can be.

Honestly sounds like you handled it very well. Starting with strong parental controls, then gradually decreasing it as they become more mature and understanding of the dangers is definitely the best way to provide online safety, without being overly restrictive or invasive. The important part being that they can learn what's normal from the real world before going into the digital world.

I just wish that this was the standard for every child. So many of them are handed completely unrestricted tablets and smartphones from a very young age these days.

> A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids.

The funny thing is hearing adult people shouting aloud that kids suffer from social media use and bla bla bla let the same people have been ruining their own relationship with their life partners, family and even their whole life for years by spending way too much time in front of TV, computers and by doomscrolling all day on instagram and tiktok.

I don't understand how these people are all acting as if only children need to be saved. Banning stuff to children won't even work if the only example they have of adulthood are people with a hunchback staring lifelessly at a small screen on the palm of their hand all day.

How is this funny? You make it sound like it's hypocritical or self-unaware. I'm finding the opposite: it's exactly because these people are aware of what social media does to them (and/or close friends and relationships) that they want it to be out of kids hands who'd be even more impacted by the negative aspects of it.

In other words, they're not saying "it's okay when I do it but not kids", they're saying "even as an adult it's impacting me, let's not poison kids"

I think you are 100% right. Let's ban social media for all ages and wipe this scourge from the planet.

HackerNews: This will be a perfect use case for my federated, zero-knowledge, GPG-based, homomorphically encrypted web-of-trust (written in Rust)!

Government: lol, every HTTP request must include your government ID, period :)

This has been in process for over a year. It's not a sudden thing. The press you saw was all part of a campaign to push the idea.

>People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted.

These are also the people who have essentially outsourced a lot of upbringing of their kids to the govt. They couldn't be bothered with the nuances of the lives their kids lead.