But most importantly, there's no expectation of kid to be on social media anymore, which is much more important than whether they are actually there or not.
The reasonable approach to solve this problem is verification protocol that mandates integration with the apps chosen by users. You have your wallet with digital ID and you use only it on any website, sharing the bare minimum of details. No uploads of anything anywhere. Independent wallet providers ensure privacy and prevent state overreach.
> (b) a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.
Unfortunately dark places existed in mainstream social media too. It’s something that should receive sufficient attention from law enforcement, nothing has changed here.
I don't get why people believe there's a conspiracy here. There's perhaps a large tent, but "social media bad" is not a controversial opinion! "The gov't should do something about it" is more controversial, though I think the controversiality is less heavy in spaces with parents, teachers, places where people have to deal with kids.
Not that this is how things should be determined, but... I think reading this as a "get more data and track people" play feels like giving everyone involved too much credit. It really just feels like what it says on the tin here.
Arguably parental control should have been enough to avoid all of this but the regulation still helps parents. It’s way more difficult to ask kids not to have social media when all of their friends have it.
I would have preferred stricter social media platform regulation for everyone forcing tech companies to take responsibility for what happens on their platforms. It’s not that they are dangerously only for kids
The issue is that now the government knows what you are doing online, and that should never be allowed to happen.
I grew up when the Internet was truly free, before Facebook even existed. People shared source code, videos, MP3s, games, regardless of "copyright" or "intellectual property." To some extent, it is still possible to do all of this, but these freedoms are being eroded every day by making the Internet less anonymous. The endgame is obviously to force people to pay for things whose "marginal cost" is zero in the language of economists. "Protecting the children" is just a convenient excuse.
There is a distinction between getting data from an ISP and getting it via your use of their portal, but I’d argue it’s without much of a difference in reality.
Since we don't see a whole lot of moderately healthy democracies arbitrarily jailing people for life, one might reasonably assume these sorts of controls work.
There's zero technical necessity for this. You could do zero knowledge proofs with crypto key pairs issued together with the eID.
The Swiss proposal for eID includes stuff like that. If a service needs proof of age, you use an app on your phone to generate the response, which is anonymized towards the requester and doesn't need to contact a government server at all.
The "service" is irrelevant. I think most people would trust Porno Hub to be discreet about their visits. That's in their business interest. But now they have to tell your government about all the times you're visiting Porno Hub.
And nobody should trust their government.
Also, keep in mind that western governments share with each other. There will come a time when Australians will try to enter USA but they'll get flagged at the border because the AUS government shared that this particular individual visited Porno Hub and a few other age-restricted websites 7,000 times in the last 30 days. Red Flag!
Nobody should trust a billion dollar corporation, that's why we have democratically elected governments. All these power hungry fucks counter balance each-other, to some extend at least.
51% of a vote can go the wrong way now and then.
What else is there? You are effectively only asked to choose between bad and worse candidates at a fairly low frequency.
They also have more direct means of accessing more specific data via ISPs, audits, banks, etc.
The hypothetical government isn't going to make stuff up about me, some nobody, on a flight to the US to be a tourist or something. They statistically don't care about me. However, the US morality police might decide to statistically care about everyone who watches porn.
But if I'm a somebody, say a former or potential whistleblower, or a local politician, etc. then a government might have a specific motive to do me dirty and not care about being honest.
I guess there's a wide and blurry line between being a "nobody" the government has no motivation to lie about and being a "somebody" that deserves special malicious treatment.
(If you watch porn online, you can be pretty sure they already "know" it, because you're not doing it in the privacy of your own home, you're doing it on a public network with next to no secrecy about who you are or what you're doing).
The fear of an evil government misusing something, more often than not, is a thought terminating cliche. It means we cannot regulate, or create any laws about anything, because evil people could abuse those laws. In reality, evil people do evil shit, irrespective of the laws available for abuse.
Are you and I living in the same reality? They're constantly just making things up out of nowhere from nothing and refusing to back down. Now to the point of arresting US citizens with a secret police and committing international war crimes in open waters.
Just because people lie, doesn't mean we need to shrug ok lets just hand over all our private data everywhere.
But I dig ya! What the current US government does is abhorrent.
That you categorize all of those things in the same boat is very partisan. And it is exactly why a government controlling access to information is a very bad idea. Some of those things aren't real phenomena, others are just over hyped and some are real and very much proven. The news sources you got those opinions from are highly partisan but you trust them implicitly even though you have access to the Internet and can cross check many of them. That you can make such blind mistakes is exactly why elected officials should never control the flow of information. And to give you an example of an opinion that very much matters, consider is nuclear power green or not? The wrong answer about that is doing more damage than your most hated official could ever do.
- January 6th was an attempted coup of the government coordinated by Republican interest groups and antagonized by Trump.
- Vaccines do not cause autism.
- Climate change is real and anthropological in origin.
- The 2020 election was not rigged for Biden and there exists no evidence of impropriety of any kind.
- Haitians did not eat people's pet dogs in the USA. This was just plain, out-in-the-open racism.
- The US military is using the WMD, sorry, I mean the "drug boat" excuse on vessels 1,200 miles away from US waters to execute a dozen people at a time. They are providing no evidence and performing no seizures or investigations. Then they are violating international law and their own documents on war crimes and service member's duty to refuse by having them execute shipwreck survivors.
Everything above is a fact. Not an opinion. Not partisan. A fact.
And that's assuming the technical solution is deployed everywhere. I'm in the EU with one of those IDs, and I still had to upload photos of my passport and scan my face to open a bank account. The identification process even had its own app that I had to install.
So, when the government issues this ban, the kids would listen to their parents a lot more easily.
Government says you can't chat with just anyone in Roblox, and suddenly it's accepted that this is just what it is. Not only that, but limits and rules on how much and when you can watch YouTube and the like are also suddenly more acceptable.
So far what my kids are saying is that this is broadly true across their peer groups. The exceptions are just that, exceptions. The peer pressure to be in on it all is lessened. And in turn, that means less push-back on boundaries set by us, because it's less of a big deal.
(And I face less of a dilemma of how much to allow to balance out the harm of not being part of the zeitgeist vs. the harm of short form, mega-corporation curated content).
So many people are looking at this from a technical stand point and how water tight or perfect its going to be.
But there is a large psychological part of this that helps parents and I know that part of it is what a number of parents I've spoken to like about it.
Its not just about the current generation, but the next wave of kids who have grown up under these laws, the psychology of it will have changed.
This also works with other things such as alcohol and (old school) smoking (neither of which has watertight control, but the control is still very effective).
We've long lost this war.
I'm in Italy, staying at my 3rd Airbnb. I was surprised when the first asked me, casually, to drop a photograph of my passport in the chat. I checked with Claude: yep, that's the law.
(I'll remind you that Italy is in the EU.)
On checking into this place last week, the guy just took a photo of our passports on his phone. At this point I'm too weak to argue. And what's the point? That is no longer private data and if I pretend that it is, I'm the fool.
The difference between sending it over a chat and handing it over to a clerk (who then photocopies it or types in the data into the computer) feels almost academic. Though at least "Typing it into the computer" doesn't leave them with a picture, just most of the data.
The difference is that the paper copy is local and only accessible to the hotel (and any government employee that might come knocking).
The digital version is accessible to anyone who has access to the system, which as we know well on HN includes bureaucrats (or police) with a vendetta against you and any hacker that can manage to breach the feeble defenses of the computer storing the data. That computer isn't locked down because the information is not valuable to the person who holds it; they're paid to satisfy a record-keeping law, not maintain system security.
> at least "Typing it into the computer" doesn't leave them with a picture, just most of the data.
Agreed, except now uploading a scan is the easiest way to file the data.
I do agree that "not without a warrant" is a pretty load-bearing thing and it _should_ be tedious to get information. When a lot of info is just so easy to churn through that can activate new forms of abuse, even if from an information-theoretical point of view the information was always there.
And it's not even just about public officials. All those stories of people at Google reading their exes emails or whatever (maybe it was FB? Still) sticks to me.
- Fraudster has to bribe hotel staff, or get on staff and then work there and steal documents. Tricky.
New attack vector:
- Fraudster rents out Airbnb. Trivial.
This pretty much lowers the bar to any random website on the internet can ask for ID to do something as trivial as look at a photo.
In a world where social engineering is the last unsolvable security vector, this is significant even if it is just a matter of degree.
The risks are not worth the rewards of half-heatedly trying to stop kids communicating with other kids. They're still going to bully each other and what have you. They're still going to develop unrealistic expectations. They're probably even still going to use social media in practice.
As a parent myself, it definitely helps when you can collectively avoid having your kids on these platforms. I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board.
4chan, Mastedon, BlueSky, PeerTube, Pixelfed
They have millions of users. They're about to get more.
No, you can't block these. No, you can't order these to do anything.
The idea that someone is going to make an engaging experience on a “decentralized” network is honestly a bit silly to me. The market potential of this business is low. Decentralized networks with much larger incentives have failed to capture critical mass.
There will be side effects, but social media has been so ridiculously corrosive to the welfare of teenagers that I can’t imagine a ban would be worse.
You pick one of the worst examples? Prohibition drove a black market for spirits . the 21st amendment repealed it because the government missed out on hundreds of thousands in taxes.
The reason to make the law and repeal it were both awful. The lessons learned were all wrong. It's just awful all around (and I speak as someone that doesn't really drink much).
This prohibition era retcon is a way to justify the fact that people like to drink and there were many people who stood to make money on re-legalization.
Which is why I said the question of it being a good thing is different. I encourage you to look at the data, as someone who also enjoys to drink.
Government bans are surprisingly effective in most developed countries.
My lens is "did America actually learn anything valuable from this period?". And all I see is "We The Government are fine poisoning our citizens as long as we profit from it". A lesson that passed on to cigarettes, then hard drugs, then fast food (which persists to this day), and now with social media. Then The Government wonders why no one trusts them to do the right thing.
In that lens, I'd say prohibition and its downstream effects on how to regulate in general was absolutely awful and damning.
*allowing our citizens to make their own choices about what they consume
Remember how pervasive cigarette ads used to be?
Human behavior is variable and can be influenced, even against our best interest.
At what point do we acknowledge advertising as a form of psychological attack that causes people to do harmful things they wouldn't otherwise do?
The government's role in this imo shouldn't be to allow corporations to try to convince people to hurt themselves and then to sell them things to hurt themselves with, but then turn around and restrict people's rights to slow down the self harm. Rather I believe the government should seek to annihilate corporations that try to harm the population.
Is not the implicit relationship between corporations, people, and government, such that corporations want to be allowed to exploit a population for profit in return for some nominal good, and the government allows that only so long as the good outweighs the harm?
Why not?
I've got a marketing campaign ready that will sweep the nation and convince millions to ReVitaleZ!
Meanwhile, years after the actual Radithor radium water [1] scandal, the very same government was merrily blowing up atomic bombs in open air, in the desert [2].
And even today there are crazy people around the world happily consuming radioactive gas in specially designed spas [3]. They should be locked up for their own good, the government always knows better!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor
[2] https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/downwind-upshot-knot...
I'm shocked the same government which supports global warming and mass species extinction, and which threatens to bomb "shithole countries" "back to the Stone age", has a less than perfect attitude about nuclear weapons. Shocked I say!
Next I suppose you'll say that this same government hasn't clamped down hard on coal power plants which, in addition to their CO2 emissions, generates ash which destroys waterways, kills people, and is full of radioactive waste?
I'm so glad our governments always know better than that!
It would be a shame if food and drug laws were in place mostly because even rich people and politicians can't ensure their food and drugs are safe.
It's time to take my protein powder supplements. I'm glad the government inspects every manufacturer so I don't have to worry about doing my own lead tests each time I buy some. Thank you Orrin Hatch for your diligence!
When decentralized networks win, they often win so big that they become invisible. AOL is dead, the web isn't. Email, the global telephone network, the internet itself, these are all decentralized networks.
The hardest part of doing this for social media is actually discovery. It's easier to show people an "engaging" feed when your algorithm has access to the full firehose to select from. But that doesn't mean doing it in a decentralized way is impossible, and if you pass a law that drives people away from centralized services, the incentive to do it goes up.
You're also missing what folks keep saying: the network effect isn't there. It needs to be popular enough that there's social pressure to be there. If it's that large, it's going to be large enough to be on the radar and then be under enforcement.
Slippery-slope arguments, for the most part, exist to fear monger folks away from change, even when the argument itself is non-sensical.
well for one: I find it humorous how this law has an exception for Roblox. That really speaks to how up to date lawmakers are on the situation (or worse: how easy it was for Roblox to pay them off). I don't see how it's a slippery slope when the corruption is before our very eyes.
I don't think it's just corruption, there are people who are trying to do the right thing, even if flawed.
YouTube’s tendency to push extreme rabbit holes and funnel towards extremism and conservatism in young men is what led to them being included.
He hates women, to the point of trafficking them. He's a predator and he spreads hate, and it reflects poorly on conservatives if they feel that represents their political views.
The problem is, it's also an asymmetric weapon when you try to ban that unevenly. If you censor Tate but not the likes of Kendi who use the same tricks, you're saying that it's fine for one side to play dirty but not the other, and that's how you get people mad. Which plays right into the hands of the demagogues.
So all you have to do is achieve perfect balance and censor only the bad things from both sides, right? Except that that's one of the things humans are incapable of actually doing, because of the intensely powerful incentive to censor the things you don't like more than the things you do, if anyone holds that power.
Which is why we have free speech. Because it's better to let every idiot flap their trap than to let anyone else decide who can't. And if you don't like what someone is saying, maybe try refuting it with arguments instead of trying to silence them.
Not necessarily. You need to have that controversy shown to enough people of similar mindsets, which requires a platform, or for them to somehow grow their local audience, which was difficult for folks on the fringe to do in the past, but is easy now that social media promotes the fringe.
> So all you have to do is achieve perfect balance and censor only the bad things from both sides, right?
No. Regulate social media that drives views to these people. They're able to exist because social media uses algorithms based on engagement, and these people game the engagement system to slowly radicalize them. If you remove the pipeline, you also lower the popularity of these people.
Sure, some of this is word of mouth, but it's mostly not. Social media actively encouraging people to view this content.
> Because it's better to let every idiot flap their trap than to let anyone else decide who can't.
Yes, but free speech doesn't include the right to be platformed. Depending on the country, the definition of free speech also differs, and I have a feeling you're only considering this from the US point of view.
Fixed that for you.
Which previously parents could blocking using the parental tools. Now they cannot because logged out will still show said videos.
The government are idiots
That's the point, there are always fringe social networks you don't know, and they are probably x10 toxic than reddit comment sections.
We should be aiming to remove purposely addictive things from our children's lives, and all currently popular social media platforms are addiction machines.
Slippery slope arguments exist because the act of governing has the tendency to converge on ratchet effects. It never bloody loosens, do every damn inch has to be treated with maximal resistance.
Society already puts limits on children's access to media, their access to addictive substances, advertising that's allowed to be shown to them, etc. The internet, and especially social media, is a gap in the existing limits. This isn't a slippery slope, it's adding a missing set of compliance.
Social media is: media, addictive, shows unregulated advertising to them, is psychologically harmful, and their algorithms have been radicalizing them.
Regulation is absolutely needed here. I'd rather see tight regulation, rather than being blocked completely, but social media companies have been highly resistant to that. For example, they shouldn't be allowed to show advertising, they shouldn't be able to do tracking, they shouldn't be allowed to have an algorithm led feed, notifications should be mostly off by default (and any notification that is shown to primarily exist to make you open the app should be disallowed).
The problem with changes like that is that they destroy the network's engagement and remove their profit, and for the most part, it's changes adults would like to see as well. Making those changes for some countries laws would push other countries to introduce similar laws and not limit them to children.
There would be nothing new here?
The argument is that kids being online isn’t the governments business one way or the other.
The slippery slope argument is always secondary, but how often has government regulation not grown in size and scope? Combine that with how norms shift and the type of large scale identity infrastructure put in place to support this, can you honestly say this isn’t going to grow?
All of that also ignores the possibility (read inevitability) that a bad actor/authoritarian would exploit this access further without popular support.
And they tie your SIM card with your ID.
Do you think there should there be police on every corner you must submit your ID to to prove you're not an illegal immigrant?
This law isn't letting anyone use social media freely until they're suspected of not being an adult, at which point they have to age verify. It requires everyone to identify themselves whenever they want to view, interact, reply or share content on the internet.
Additionally, the law makes no judgement on the technology used to identify age, just that social media companies need to make an effort. I suspect that companies will not want to deal with the data security issues (very illegal to share pictures of underage people without consent), and will not be "sharing" with 3rd parties.
Everyone who wants to view, interact with or share that content has to verify their age to do so.
> I suspect that companies will not want to deal with the data security issues (very illegal to share pictures of underage people without consent), and will not be "sharing" with 3rd parties.
There are countless instances of exactly this happening, over and over again, not to mention that it's the way age verification's implemented now nearly everywhere lol
Pretty much every company will contract a 3rd party service to perform those checks, making sure they get as much bang for as little buck as possible. Said services are usually the weak link that shares the data with others, often through PNGs in public buckets so that Russian teenagers have an easy job CURLing them.
If the government took security seriously, it’d endorse a solution and then take responsibility for it, given it came up with the law in the first place.
No, they aren't just that, because they are government regulations requiring everyone wanting access to something that cannot be marketed to children under the rules to prove that they are not a child, which is not inherently essential to a regulation of what can be marketed to children.
There is a difference between regulating what can be marketed to children and mandating that vendors secure proof that every user is not a child.
(Just as there is a difference between prohibiting knowingly supplying terrorists and requiring every seller to conduct a detailed background check of every customer to assure that they are not a terrorist.)
---
[1]: Tangentially, those are trivially circumvented in many countries. When I was a teenager in St. Petersburg, we’ve used a “duty free delivery service”, which (I suppose) just stocked liquor at the duty free shop on the border with Finland, and then sold it. Not sure how legal was the core premise (probably not), but we used it because their couriers didn’t even pretend they need to check our passports (definitely illegal).
In many countries, alcohol is available in grocery delivery services. Couriers happily leave your order at the doorstep even though they are supposed to check your ID. In many other countries, even buying in-store is possible (e.g. Japan, where in any konbini you can just press a button on screen saying “yes, I’m 21”).
I think I still can dispute it in court, but for that I’ll have to go back to Russia. (I could hire a lawyer, but the amount is like $300.)
When uploading ID documents, your account gets tied to your real world identity. That's not a precedent the government should be setting, because private entities having an excuse (the law) to require identification erodes privacy, and because in the future other services could be required to ask for an identification, too. Yes, it's the slippery slope (aka "boiling the frog") argument, but that's how laws that erode privacy evolve - step by step.
Now it's account for social media, then it's porn sites, then it's forums where you might see porn or discussions on suicide, drugs or anything deemed morally hazardous. They might require an ID just to view the site or require the site to not make it public. If (or "when", if we don't oppose such laws) enough countries mandate something like this, most sites will likely require an account for all content, regardless of where the person is located, as otherwise they'll likely have to prove that they've not only geolocated the IP of the visitor, but checked that they weren't using VPNs, Tor or similar services.
As for using zero-knowledge proofs and similar technology to make it less infringing on privacy - I very much doubt the government (any government) to implement this with 100% privacy and security.
Actually in Australia, IDs usually do get scanned and stored. About the same time I was getting too old for clubs, they were starting to introduce ID scanners. You line up, hand over your driver's licence or passport, they slap it on a wall-mounted scanner, the scan goes into a database and in you go. No scan, no entry. Nowadays I think they just use phone/tablet scanners.
Yes, handheld is now used. If you use the digital licences app on your phone in NSW/QLD the licence details are picked up by a QR code and cross verified via an auth API with Services NSW / TMR QLD. You are also checked against a database of banned patrons, against court ordered exclusions, and police issued exclusions. If you use the physical licence, an extra step of ID —> licence details extracted occurs, then the same process is followed.
I agree that people will lose their identity online if age checks become normalised. That’s not been the case with the club and inner city alcohol venues checks.
In Finland the government has allowed banks to offer (2fa) identification services to those that are using their services. If I sign into a government site using my banking ID, the bank gets paid for providing the service. To my understanding none of my actual ID information is transferred to a party wanting to identify me.
The Linkedin 'validate your identity' was the first time i was asked to actually take a picture of my passport/scan the chip. I'll refuse until they'll allow me to identify with my banking ID.
Actually, in lots of places it was porn sites first, but...
I wish they did, that would be huge.
Of course, nobody is sure what "reasonable steps" actually means, other than a selfie or ID upload.
Here is the text of the bill: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....
The slippery slope is long behind us, we're already at the bottom.
This pattern of thought is exactly the issue. Stop offloading parenting of your children to government! That won't end well for neither children nor adults.
You cannot parent in isolation and outside of society. How society is structured has an huge impact on parenting. It is delusional to think of parenting as some kind of thing that exists in isolation separate from and not influenced by the rest of society. Parents often can only have little influence themselves.
This is a value neutral description. Though I do think total parental autonomy in parenting is not a worthwhile goal and also not at all realistic. As parents you have to deal with society.
What does that mean for social media bans? To me mostly: network effects are wicked strong and fighting against them as an individual parent is basically impossible. This can lead to parents only having bad choices available to them (ban social media use and exclude them from their friends, allow social media use and fry their brains). Are bans that right solution? Don’t know. I’m really not sure. But I do know that it‘s not as simple as „parent better“.
From my point of view I'm already paying for their brats with higher taxes, now I will also have to gradually give my documents to random web sites more and more just to reduce the "burden" of parenting on lazy parents...
As an actual parent, I have never heard of this or seen it. Can you provide some real examples?
How is the quote from OP's comment that is right at the end of the sentence you cited not a "real example"?
It's an extremely American religious belief that everything is an individual problem. Luckily, almost no other country has this religion.
Since the law doesn't actually say how it should be implemented, it's compatible with existing law. Actually I wonder if simply sending the "I am 18+" header would already be legal in Australia. Probably not, on the basis that it doesn't actually work right now, but maybe they could convince a judge that it's actually the browser's fault it doesn't respect the header.
- Makes it illegal to ask users for ids.
- Sets the same "penalty" for requiring ids as for "deliberately allowing minors"
Please either provide supporting evidence or stop making misleading claims.
Section 63DB.
Please actually read before making me waste rate limit slots.
Here is the law: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....
Are environmental laws are a way of off-loading all environmental care to the government?
Are laws against violence a way of off-loading physical protection to the government?
Compromising my privacy in order to allow you to omit having some tough but needed conversations with your child (i.e. _parenting_) regarding harms of social media is not a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Homer Simpson was supposed to be a parody on a bad father, not a role model with his "You're the government's problem now!".
> Are laws against violence a way of off-loading physical protection to the government?
Of course they are! I support government protecting me from violence in some capacity, although I don't support "chat control"-like laws since the cost/benefit doesn't seem to be favorable.
As any parent knows, if you tell your kids that something is harmful, they will stop immediately. No questions asked. I've never met a child who did something their parents told them not to do, have you?
> I support government protecting me from violence in some capacity
So, you do like big government telling people what they can and can't do, as long as you feel it directly helps you. That said, laws against violence don't protect you from violence, the laws kick in after the fact.
> I don't support "chat control"-like laws since the cost/benefit doesn't seem to be favorable.
Possibly because you don't have kids and thus maybe not a full understanding of the cost/benefit? Perhaps, instead of lecturing actual parents about what parenting is like, you could ask questions about the cost/benefit you claim to be interested in.
You can configure parental controls or take away the phone.
> So, you do like big government telling people what they can and can't do, as long as you feel it directly helps you.
Yes, of course!
> That said, laws against violence don't protect you from violence, the laws kick in after the fact.
They protect me by discouraging other people from committing violence on me, obviously.
> Possibly because you don't have kids and thus maybe not a full understanding of the cost/benefit? Perhaps, instead of lecturing actual parents about what parenting is like, you could ask questions about the cost/benefit you claim to be interested in.
Cost/benefit for me, not for Homer Simpson-esque dads. You already took responsibility on yourself by becoming a parent, now please do the hard part (the parenting).
Your first suggestion was silly, so now you have pivoted to telling me another way to parent. All the while have zero experience of your own. Did you know that social media is accessible on devices other than personal phones? Kids use computers and tablets at school (as early as 1st grade) with access to the internet.
> Yes, of course!
Which is my entire point. Parents, on the other hand, have to worry about people other than themselves.
> They protect me by discouraging other people from committing violence on me, obviously.
Now you are outsourcing your personal protection to the government. I have to pay extra because you can't defend yourself. You took on the responsibility of protecting yourself by being born.
> Cost/benefit for me
We get it, you don't care about anyone else. Things that help you are good, things that inconvenience you are a product of other people's errors. Nothing more really needs to be said.
Parents are supposed to be parenting, without the help of the Government. You do not want your kid to spend their time on Facebook or Instagram? Do something about it yourself, as a parent. I understand that tech-illiterate people may be at a disadvantage here, but we are on HN and I am pretty sure we are able to:
Set up a Raspberry Pi (or any other SBC, or even an old x86 box) running Pi-hole with custom blocklists, configure DNS-level filtering with time-based access rules, or implement iptables/nftables rules on your router to enforce schedules. You can use hostapd with separate SSIDs for children with different firewall rules, set up a transparent proxy with squid + SquidGuard for content filtering and time restrictions, or configure your router's DHCP to assign specific DNS servers per MAC address with dnsmasq managing time windows. If you want more granular control, there's pfSense or OPNsense with packages like pfBlockerNG-devel for domain blocking and traffic shaping, or you could write a simple cron job that modifies your firewall rules based on time of day. These are all straightforward solutions that don't require government-mandated age verification systems with their inevitable privacy nightmares and implementation overreach.
The technical capability exists; the question is whether parents are willing to invest a few hours to implement it rather than demanding legislation to do their job for them.
Why wouldn't we want the government to support parenting in similar ways the Government support's retirement, personal security, entrepreneurship, education, health, and other societally important activities?
> These are all straightforward solutions that don't require government-mandated age verification systems with their inevitable privacy nightmares and implementation overreach.
Yes, they are. They all also stop being effective as soon as a child is outside of your wifi network, which was my entire point.
> whether parents are willing to invest a few hours to implement it rather than demanding legislation to do their job for them.
Framing it this way doesn't really help your point. It proves that you don't understand what parents are actually dealing with. It is the same response that people on HN have when a non-developer writes a technical article in NYT.
Mandatory identification and age-verification requirements are against privacy, justified under the familiar refrain of "think of the children". The critical question is how far society is willing to go in accepting pervasive surveillance and data collection under this rationale. Not long ago, we expressed concern and even disdain toward such practices when observing them in countries like China. Today, however, the gap between those systems and our own is narrowing to an uncomfortable degree.
FWIW there are technically sound, privacy-preserving solutions to achieve this goal. Zero-knowledge proofs, for example, can verify eligibility or age without disclosing identity or personal data. These solutions are well understood and feasible. Yet they are consistently excluded from policy discussions and implementations. This omission suggests that the underlying objective is not genuine child protection, nor meaningful respect for individual privacy, but rather increased control and data accumulation.
> They all also stop being effective as soon as a child is outside of your wifi network, which was my entire point.
True, these solutions do not work outside your Wi-Fi, but the point is that government-mandated age verification compromises privacy for limited benefit. I believe parental guidance (and the guidance of their teachers, ideally) and household controls are more effective. In any case, the broader point is that there is no technical silver bullet. Parents will always need to combine education, guidance, and trust-building with any tools, rather than relying on government mandates that compromise privacy.
I agree. You haven't explained why the government can't be one of those tools, just as it is for so many other harmful activities (drugs, alcohol, gambling, firearms, etc.).
You use the phrase "relying on" to imply parents are just asking government to do everything for them. A more charitable view is that this is a tool along with other tools to support a common societal goal.
Maybe the civil rights movement wouldn't even be possible in this era.
This is a very narrow scale when taking the bigger picture, as these are just prominent events in Middle Eastern history since the growth of social media usage, say after 2011.
You are not even considering the travesties avoided due to social media, what regulatory action has been avoided (or taken) to avoid social media backlashes.
You are being extremely disingenuous, and you are directly attacking some peoples' only hope of minimizing repression. I urge you to reconsider your beliefs. This directly and critically affects me.
Where I live, we’re already free from repression and social media threatens to reintroduce it.
I guess the question is, how should citizens communicate with each other? Who should apply the restrictions? If the authoritarian state is applying the restrictions, then it's probably for their own goals.
But really, people should communicate with each other by means not including algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement. Preferably including as little emotion as possible when it comes to discussing policy.
I think that's the problem, not "social media". We're typing these comments on social media, after all.
Liberal ideas require more explaining and historical context, and they don’t play well when everyone has been triggered and trolled into limbic system mode by rage bait.
Liberal politics speaks to the neocortex. Authoritarianism speaks to the brain stem.
>downvoted out
Erm...
Also there’s a world of difference between people registering dislike on an online forum and the use of state power. It seems like a lot of people these days draw no distinction between removal from a private space or even people just showing disapproval and actual state force.
It created a world where: when disapproval inside an echo-chamber fails to a critical mass of people telling the truth, just pretend the content doesn't exist and then gaslight people using official media outlets, including Congress and the White House.
So it gave people the impression there's no difference between the two. Not only were disapproval and state force in agreement, they colluded.
That's odd because I don't see a lot of that. Care to elaborate?
I would say that much bigger problem is possibly the influence of these sites on development of young people. We know it's addictive, we know it's harmful. Cigarettes and alcohol are banned for the same reason so I'm kinda glad for this Australian experiment. We'll see.
The Social media platforms of today are very clearly harmful to our youth. Just like alcohol and cigarettes are to a developing brain. Why can we ban those and not this?
Nearly everything about it that’s bad for teens also sucks for the rest of us.
Government assumes zero expected trust reciprocation because they don't have to provide trust reciprocation and can do what they want, and government is comprised of co-opted humans.
Err on the side of sovereign freedom. Arguing about banning this or regulating that is all second principle stuff, and nanny states all strike me as the tail-end of civilization.
The ubiquity of the internet and children’s access to it is something we haven’t reckoned with yet. The differences between pre social media and mobile vs now is immense. The people seeking to capitalize on getting children addicted to something are numerous and well motivated by LTV.
Their incentives and the wellbeing of children are directly at odds. We already regulate things that are addictive for children.
People might give their kids a drink extralegally. Nobody is saying “hey kid, why don’t we watch porn together so you can develop healthier habits.” Nobody is creating a “starter Instagram” with their teenage daughter.
These forms of media are NOT SAFE FOR KIDS. They have observably negative population wide outcomes and are as reasonably banned as lead in pipes.
But schools do. Their friends all have Internet enabled devices in their pockets. The library he goes to has poorly secured devices. The school library does too.
This is what I mean by the ubiquity of the internet. It is functionally impossible to control access to the internet as a parent and allow your children to develop independence.
I do what I can, and have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars at this point to opt in to like minded environments. My oldest at ten is observably different than children at his age and doing great.
His friends that come from poorer families, like the ones that I grew up in, might as well have Roblox as a third parent and suffer from ridiculous behavioral problems. The school curriculum in SFUSD is years behind my curriculum was in Georgia when it was a bottom quintile outcome program.
It does not take much looking to see something is thoroughly wrong. I think a lot of it has to do with the mass experiment of Internet access we’ve run on children.
Funny enough I lived in the Atlanta metro area from 1996 to 2022. I had a house built in Decatur in 2003.
I started dating my now wife in 2011. She lived in Alpharetta. As soon as I met my now step sons who were 9 and 14, my first thought was in going to have to sell my house and move. There is no way in hell they are going to survive Decatur public schools.
We moved to Johns Creek at first and then had a house built in Forsyth County. Yeah this Forsyth County
https://youtu.be/WErjPmFulQ0?si=qfgRouGzQvm_nI1h
The attitudes in the burbs of Forsyth changed since then as people came from other places and it grew. But we very much stuck out. My son loved it there and still lives in that area and rents a house nearby where you use to live.
Agreed, but observation suggests that it takes much more effort to do something about it—effort that the majority cannot muster or are unwilling to commit to.
That's the Orwellian payoff: people self-censoring and frightened to act for rear of retribution or their reputation. It's the authoritarian's ideal approach to control.
Providing age assurance is what banning teens from social media requires. This is already happening in the US in several states.
Regulating social media is the alternative.
You've never been more free.
Facebook Instagram Threads Kick Reddit Snapchat TikTok Twitch X (formerly Twitter) YouTube
Here's what's going to happen next: Whatsapp/signal/telegram groups will become wildly popular. Which gives the wannabe-fascists the excuse to ban those as well 'for the children'.
We've seen this salami tactic often enough to know the pattern.
Not too sure about those zit-popping videos. But in my time, we had rotten.com - so I might be immunized to that kind of stuff. Personally, I find a honest zit-popping video no worse than yet another AI voice going on and on about some non-topic, clearly written by AI as well. I don't seek out either, but the zit-popping at least is over after 10 seconds.
But that's Google curating content. State censorship is something else entirely. Once justified "for the children" or "for security", it never stops at the first target. It grows, layer by layer. We’ve watched that pattern repeat for centuries across every medium humans have ever invented.
Facebook, the genocide facilitator? If we are honest, so has the printing press. Let's ban letters, they have facilitated genocide.
The printing press spread enlightenment, propaganda, revolutions, and atrocities. The State tried to control that too. It failed every time. It will fail with the net, for young people and for old ones.
Repression never works long-term, it always creates pressure that eventually breaks the system that produced it. Historically, societies tend to get worse before they correct themselves, because authoritarian overreach generates exactly the instability it claims to prevent.
Jefferson’s warning about the recurring need to renew freedom wasn’t a call for violence - it was an observation about the cyclical nature of power, repression, and reform. Every attempt to restrict communication has eventually collapsed under its own contradictions, and the internet will be no exception.
Why didn't they just legislate that all social media apps content must be like Facebook in 2005. No recommendations, chronological timeline only, and you only see posts from users you explicitly added. That would have benefited everyone forever, and not enabled some small subset of apps to collect your govt id or the law to be irrelevant when the next popular social network comes along.
They effectively banned only the popular cigarette brands, instead of regulating nicotine.
If services would argue this would make them all the same, then add a clause where the user can opt in to have an algorithm shove content at them like now if they are over 18.
This way everyone can use the basic service for true socializing, but the harmful stuff is actually regulated out by default.
Too much money etc for this to ever happen, but geez they could have done a lot better.
As with addiction or clicking a ratchet forward, they knew that reversing direction would then be nigh on impossible. Society seems to have little or no defense against such threats and I'd bet London to a brick that it'll be repeated with AI.
Youtube for one is an advertising machine. On the other hand it is one of the few places where one can find some amazing educational and entertainment content. Prohibiting it I think is a crime.
Besides, lately Politicians stick their noses everywhere. It is just way too much.
Tech is trying to push all these wonderful LLM's on us, telling us how it works like magic. Meanwhile, it can't even follow basic public TV labeling.
I think that is a surprisingly good solution. You can still access educational information, or really whatever videos you want, but you have to actively seek them out rather than ingest whatever is spit out at you.
we didn't ban cigarettes, we disincentivized them. Why can't we do the same here? regulate the algorithms, not the platform (the platform ultimately being "the internet").
This is just a cat and mouse game where every few years the government will ban whatever the kids like. That's not how you create a high trust society.
In Australia, not that much and we (Australia) passed the point of diminishing returns and moved into the zone of incentivising a criminal black market.
The state of play today is that foreign nationals, Syrians and others, are chasing billions in illicit tobacco revenue, denying that to the Government as income, firebombing and shooting up cars, shops, and families of rivals.
The brutality levels have risen to the point where old school leg breaking Chopper Read era crims are speaking out about going too far, involving families and "breaking code".
Social policy always has a balance.
https://nida.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/2024/08/canna...
It’s not that I have an opinion either way. Having anything that messes with my lungs is something I don’t touch. Not that I’m a health nut. But I have been a gym addict for over 30 years.
Hallucinogens are generally considered not very addictive, they are drugs that people use infrequently and their direct health effects are usually pretty minimal - LSD for instance is a mild stimulant and vasoconstrictor, but that's no real health worry for younger users. There are mental side effects in a minority of users (HPPD etc).
Compare this to tobacco which is well known to be one of the world's most addictive substances and kills fully half of lifetime users, I'd say a society in which people 9% of people used hallucinogens in the last year is preferable to one in which (like the US was in 1965) 42% of people smoke daily.
Cannabis consumption doesn't have to involve your lungs, people consume all sorts of edibles and drinks these days. Vaping cannabis is definitely worse for your health than abstaining from both vaping and smoking, but it doesn't contain the combustion products from burning plant material. Smoking cannabis; well I honestly don't know how that compares to smoking tobacco in terms of health risk, but it is less addictive and users are less likely to be "pack a day" types than they are with cigarettes AFAICT.
Vaping nicotine, similarly, is widely considered worse than not vaping nicotine and users may be more prone to respiratory infections, plus there is often poor quality control on ingredients. But again, tobacco kills half of lifetime users.
So yeah, if I had to choose whether to have higher smoking rates or higher hallucinogen and weed use rates in society, based on expected health outcomes, I'd go with the hallucinogens and weed.
If you want to read about the comparative risks of drug use (including tobacco and alcohol, but written prior to the explosion of vapes) I highly recommend "Drugs without the hot air", a book by Prof. David Nutt, one of the UK's foremost experts on the topic. The general takeaway is that heroin, cocaine, tobacco and alcohol are the worst, and that most other drugs slot in below there somewhere.
Sure, but the Australian government's definition of an age-restricted social media platform doesn't mention advertising or algorithms at all. Technically, their definition also covers algorithm-free social media like Mastodon, which I'd argue isn't nearly as harmful.
The framing of social media as something that's inherently bad no matter how you do it is a framing that helps social media giants like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook to continue to "do it" in a way that harms people. I'm sure they love the idea that the ills of social media can be solved by banning their least profitable users while doing nothing to regulate what they do with the others. They're probably thrilled that their healthier algorithm-free competitors haven't even entered the conversation. They want to be the tobacco companies of the future, because making addictive things for adults is incredibly profitable.
That said smoking and Instagram are probably best avoided by kids
https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...
As it stands, the government in the US uses an identity verification vendor that forces you to upload videos of multiple angles of your face, enough data for facial recognition and to build 3D models, along with pictures of your ID.
I use Tor, so I get to see how age verification is implemented all over the world. By large, the process almost always includes using your government issued ID and live pictures/videos of your face.
There are zero incentives to implement zero knowledge proofs like this, and billions of dollars of incentives to use age verification as an opportunity to collect population-wide datasets of people's faces in high resolution and 3D. That data is valuable, especially for governments and companies that want to implement accurate facial recognition and who have AI models to train.
The important point is that such invasive approaches are not required; clearly, however people already authenticate with government agencies for getting a driver's licence or passport would suffice. I think it's the responsibility of knowledgeable tech people to advocate for this.
Or do you expect the government to understand there are other operating systems out there?
IOW, this problem is as "unsolved" as the problem of deciding who's allowed to drive a car, or travel to another country.
ID verification is a universal hammer, to which all problems look like nails, but we shouldn't be so quick to reach for it. Not all of its downsides can be solved with cryptography.
You might want to double-check your definition of "hard drugs", "libertarian" or both.
That kind of binary framing doesn’t really move the discussion forward.
A more constructive approach is case-by-case. Different things sit at different levels of harm, and "ban everything" vs. "ban nothing" isn’t a workable model for society.
"In 2015, 9.3% of high school students reported smoking cigarettes in the last 30 days, down 74% from 36.4% in 1997 when rates peaked after increasing throughout the first half of the 1990s"
Tobacco and porn have been more strongly regulated lately. In my teenage years, they were easily available to anyone with coins in their hands. Turns out: that didn't destroy us either.
The first beer, the first pack of strong tobacco (Rothändle, the dirtiest, hardest stuff), the first tiddie magazine from the railway station kiosk, those were rites of passages. It was a way for teenagers to push the envelope, realise alcohol makes you wobbly, tobacco causes diarrea (believe me, that Rothändle stuff was more chemical weapon than 'smooth'), and ultimately, all women look about the same undressed, so it is pointless to keep buying. They were small, recoverable mistakes that taught teenagers where their limits were.
Now we have banned all that away - but the teenage urge to self-realization and rebellion found a new way to social media. And: social media is safer: no-one got lung cancer from TikTok. No-one woke up in a hospital for facebook poisoning.
Ultimately, it is the rebellion the fascists dislike, not the fact that people earn money with it. So we ban that, driving teenagers to ever-more-destructive behaviour.
Teenagers need an outlet to be teenagers without living in a state sanctioned panopticum. If society pathologizes every form of adolescent experimentation, if you let control freaks raise your children, do not be surprised if they turn out to be either actual rebels, or something much, much darker.
Targeting platforms is like only banning one brand of cigarette. People will just find another. We should instead attack the "seller" here, being the algorithms optimized for selling and not for the enrichment of society.
What’s more, the idea that this puts children at the mercy of authoritarians is laughable. The US tech industry has shown us beyond doubt that they are perfectly ok with genuine authoritarians in charge, provided the dollars keep rolling. Fuck them, and good on ya Australia.
Plus, this is asking everyone in the country to give up their biometrics (face scanning is one implementation) or link your government issued ID to your social media account (look at the UK to see how this turned out - people are being arrested for simple tweets against the government). Sacrificing the freedom to be anonymous online to "protect the kids"
That is by no means the only solution. A lot of work is happening in the area of cryptographically verified assertions; for example, a government API could provide the simple assertion "at least 16 years of age" without the social media platform ever seeing your ID, and the government never able to tie you to the service requiring the assertion.
Yes, it could, but we don't have that, do we? They launched the ban without implementing a zero-knowledge proof scheme as you described. In a very short amount of time the providers will have associated millions of people's accounts to their biometric information and/or their government issued IDs.
It will always be cheaper to go with a vendor that forces you to scan your face and ID, because they will either be packaging that data for targeted advertising, selling the data to brokers, or making bank off of using it as population-wide training datasets.
Governments will want the data and cost savings, as well.
Both corporations and governments will want to use the platforms to tie online activity to real human beings.
Arguments like these end up like arguments for PGP in email: yes, in a perfect world we'd be using it, and platforms would make it easy, but the incentives aren't aligned for that perfect world to exist.
If the API asks for a users minimum age at a certain time, how can the government not know which data set it has to check?
Some worthwhile reading on the topic if you're interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#Zero-Know...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature
It should even possible to construct a protocol where you can prove that you're over 18 without revealing your birthdate.
Zero-Knowledge Range Proofs: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/430
"Zero-knowledge range proofs (ZKRPs) allow a prover to convince a verifier that a secret value lies in a given interval."
Umm, no. That is not how a scheme like this would work.
When implemented correctly, yes. I've edited my wording slightly to indicate that.
I just don't have faith in most countries, including Australia, to implement it with protecting the privacy of their residents in mind.
I disagree. I can't think of an implementation mistake that would allow just the government to see what services you sign up for.
You could of course screw it up so everybody could see. If the government put a keylogger on your device then they could see. However broadly speaking this is not something that can be screwed up in such a way that just the government would be able to see.
The protocol wouldn't even involve any communication with the government.
Not just theoretically posdible, people have done it: https://zkpassport.id/
"This is experimental software. While it has undergone external review, it has not yet received a formal security audit. Please use with caution and at your own risk in production environments."
Until these controls on American tech companies Trump (via all the tech CEOs fawning over him) had more control over Australian society than your own government.
The rest of the world needs similar restrictions on American tech and social media unless we all want to have American bonkers (and increasingly authoritarian) politics fully exported to us.
Yes, it does but don't kid yourself, all of Big Tech will cooperate with governments for mutual benefit. Big Tech collects data that governments would otherwise have difficulty collecting, if Big Tech is refrained from collecting data because of regulation and privacy laws then both lose out.
We should never expect governments to maintain our privacy or protect us from Big Tech leaching our data. In short, we're fighting different enemies on two fronts and that's a difficult and invidious position to be in.
In other words: this legislation is useless, and entirely stupid, and kids will bypass it trivially. Teenagers are exceptionally good at bypassing that which they find stupid, or gets in their way of what they consider to be fun, or a right.
Which tweets do you have in mind? Because it not does not describe any of the high-profile tweet-related arrests I have heard of.
Decades ago when the Australia Card—an ID system for Australians—was first proposed there was an almighty outcry from the citizenry and the project was seemingly shelved. What's happened since is that our Governments quietly ramped up their computer systems and collected the data anyway, this Law will only enhance that collection further. Moreover, recently Government introduced what at the moment are voluntary digital IDs which it sold under the guise that having a single ID will make it easier to deal with government services, etc. Unfortunately, most will unquestioningly swallow the official line and miss the fine minutiae.
I've never heard any politician or Government official come out and say "We'll never introduce an Australia Card because we're free people" or such and I'd bet that I never will. Fact is, we Australians already have had an 'Australia Card' for years, it's just that we don't carry it around in our wallets as we do with our credit cards.
Our democracy would be vastly improved if those whose governance we're under would actually tell us the truth.
Edit: Despite my comment about this new law, I agree kids need protection—so we're damned either way. I see no easy solution.
Also, I'm really struggling to think of examples where people have been arrested for "tweets against the government". The Linehan case? Most of the ones I can think of are like that — so basically culture war bullshit and overzealous policing of incitement laws.
There is considerable overlap between those who subscribe to the "trans people are a contagion" moral panic of writer Abigail Schrier, and the "ban social media" advocates in AU who were instrumental in creating this legislation.
Lawmakers in the US have said this explicitly[1] concerning laws like KOSA[2]:
> A co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill intended to protect children from the dangers of social media and other online content appeared to suggest in March that the measure could be used to steer kids away from seeing transgender content online.
> In a video recently published by the conservative group Family Policy Alliance, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said “protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture” should be among the top priorities of conservative lawmakers.
A bill that implements mass surveillance, chilling of free speech and the hurting of marginalized kids is really killing two birds with one stone for some legislators.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/sena...
The sticking point is that it's politically controversial to point this out because of progressive beliefs about gender identity as an unquestionable facet of someone's being.
And regardless, increased acceptance and awareness of different gender identities can very plausibily explain increased numbers, not "social contagion". Calling it a contagion is pretty indicative of your underlying beliefs here.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324768316_Sex_Ratio...
"Social contagion" is social science terminology. It's meant as an analogy not a pejorative.
Some social scientists say the analogy is misleading, the term is poorly defined, and contagion has a pejorative connotation irrespective of intent. They are correct.
If that's the one and only paper you have, then it's a single UK paper that covers seven years of GIDS referrals from numbers that are near zero in 2009 to 1800 referrals in 2016.
Statistically, looking at the last graphic in the paper, it's less a case of "becoming so heavily skewed" and likely more a case of "taking several years to reveal the pattern and weights".
There's scarce numbers to begin with to make a strong claim as to the "natural balance" of referrals being evident at the start and this "being skewed toward" the later clearer pattern.
As the commenter upthread noted, the adult demographic is more weighted towards men who want to be women. Why would childhood referrals have become shifted in the opposite direction, much more towards girls who want to be boys?
> There's not really any plausible explanation as to [..] other than social contagion.
is a leap.
> Why would childhood referrals have become shifted
\1 Have they really shifted, or have the stats on a relatively new thing in a few countries firmed up from nothing, to bugger all, to enough to see a pattern?
\2 As to the pattern now seen - a few boys question whether they like being boys at an earlier age than a few more girls then question whether they like being girls ..
there are other factors, eg: I heard there's a "big change" in the lives of young girls that coincides with a 'surge' (small numbers in a country the size of the UK) in girls exploring whether they want to be girls after all.
Social patterns, depth of communication about places existing where gender question can be asked, word of mouth, etc are factors that play a role - but they are not the sole factors at play in these very low incident observations.
My suggestion to yourself, looking at the questions you've raised and how you've framed them, is to perhaps study some epidemiology and find a mentor with first hand real world experience with low frequency data that gradually comes to light as social norms about reporting evolve - eg: SIDS data in the 1970s / 1980s.
You seem to be making a great many mistakes based on preconceptions and "feels".
If only the Dutch hadn't destroyed quite so many records in "their" East Indies .. there might be other gender frequency records to draw on <shrug>.
It is doctors who first drew attention to this phenomenon. See for example Tavistock whistleblower David Bell.
Why do I owe you any specific "explanation" when the context here is that you are treating Shrier's pseudoscientific book that literally tells parents in the closing chapters that if their kid has a trans friend they should consider moving cities to get their child away from their trans friend as though we are supposed to take transphobic hate literature at face value.
Maybe a better step than me agreeing to do that is that instead you should take the entire corpus of medical literature on the subject, as well as the voices of trans people on the subject of trans people at face value first.
I have no interest in your JAQing off[1].
At one end of the scale is very little data that gives an unreliable picture with a high degree of variability, at the other end of the not very long in time scale is somewhat more data that provides a better picture.
To make such a fuss about " this demographic change " indicates a lack of exposure to such statistics.
Why are you attempting to make such a big deal of bad data here?
I think some people have backed themselves into an ideological corner on this one.
I'm indifferent to the social issues here, I care about the <gasp> statistics presented.
With the linked and peer reports there's a short time span, limited populations, and a run of yearly statistics that start with very few numbers and end up with less than 2,000.
The initial numbers make the guesstimation of an inital demographic ratio extremely dodgy - it's not sound.
Despite this there's been someone with .. an idealogy(?) .. making numerous comments about "Look at the demographic shift, eh", "What's that all about", "nudge nudge".
The dull numerial reality is there's no strong evidence for a shift .. if anything it's more a "time and increasing sample sizes make for a clearer picture".
When my parents were kids, there were no left-handed kids. Social contagion is the only explanation for as to why there are suddenly so many left-handed kids today, especially since many of them are boys and not girls.
It’s about the social safety of transitioning. The paper you referenced is from the UK, which is famously a TERF island (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). In the TERF island, it’s much less safe to be a trans woman than a trans man. Adolescents can sense the risk of being a trans woman is much higher, so many trans women stay in the closet and don’t come out.
The radical feminist movement in the UK has existed much longer than this, since around the late 1960s to early 1970s.
2015-2016 is when rhetoric online and globally shifted towards villainizing trans women that weren't on the public's radar before. This was exported to UK politics and has been an incredible political success.
It's actually quite the contrary, the rest of the LGB looks at gay transphobes as the hypocrites and useful idiots they are.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
If it's about monetizing child attention not about speech control why isn't every single toy ad, food ad, movie ad, also banned?
Kids are not banned from communicating and posting with each other; the ban exempts a number of direct messing apps, as well as community apps like Discord:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/dec/10/social-media-b...
If I had to over-simplify it, then the ban appears to mostly target doom-scrolling apps. I say mostly, since I'm not sure why Twitch and Kick are included
We do ban the things that consume children the way social media does.
Alcohol, addictive drugs, etc.
This is nothing more than speech control under the guise of "won't someone please think of the children"
True, but let me remind you that we didn't have conclusive data on smoke harm until the 50s, but this doesn't mean that smoking was not harmful before, nor that we were lacking any clue before coming to a conclusive study.
At the moment we don't have any conclusive study about e-cigarettes, but I'm sure you would never give kids e-cigarettes just because we don't have 30/40 years worth of data.
> This is nothing more than speech control under the guise of "won't someone please think of the children"
This is a bit more complex than this. Kids and adolescents online are targeted with all sort of techniques to leverage their attention in order to make money. I understand the speech control worry, and I agree up to a certain point, but I don't see how ignoring the problem makes it any better. What are the alternatives we have? I'm genuinely asking, not advocating for TINA. I have two kids and I see the effects of social media on them and on their friends.
Keep in mind that this cannot be offloaded to families, for multiple reasons: - many family just don't have enough data or knowledge to make informed decisions - until the network effect is in place, banning your kid from social media while all of their friend are online can be impractical and cruel - parent decisions can affect kids health and overall society outcome; allowing a wrong decision by the parents (because the society doesn't want to handle the problem) would be unfair for the kids and no wise for the society.
As in many aspects of life the best solution is neither white nor black, but a shade of grey, and is far from being perfect. Looking for a perfect solution is a waste of time, resources and unfair for those that are affected in the meanwhile.
I understand the concerns, and probably Australia approach is not the best, but it's also the first. We probably will need a period of adjustments to reach a sound solution.
I generally agree with parent commenter - some of this will be helped by the ban but theres a serious risk a small number will go through fringe social media even less policed or normalised than the big American ones and have much higher risk on some of these issues than before.
People usually reference things that they are ashamed about as a reason to justify this fear of ID based services. I don’t find this compelling whatsoever. Every platform I’m on that is even mildly associated with identity is more enjoyable and interesting. The idea that the marketplace of ideas is slowed by identity is not something I’ve seen in practice. In authoritarian regimes we already see ways to circumvent internet anonymity. So no, I don’t see the downside.
Open to being persuaded here though, about 5 years ago I would have agreed with you.
Why make it easy for them.
I wasn't told to hate government regulations. 30 years of horrible, ineffective regulation taught me to hate these poorly thought out regulatoins. I grew up under No Child Left Behind. I saw the TSA form before my very eyes. I'm right now seeing ICE roam free, regulations be damned.
I don't hate the idea of regulation. I don't trust the people who are trying to regulate.
Aussie, Canada, much of the Europe have no issue.
Australia has had a pretty good track record with writing/implementing regulations.
We did, though. The chances of getting caught were slim to nil. Will kids (and adults for that matter) have the same easy opportunity to evade enforcement here?
But baked into that is the idea that enforcement isn't perfect so you can still disappear into the night when you have that urge to do whatever it is that is technically illegal. This allows acceptance of laws that might be considered too draconian if enforcement was perfect. However, it seems in the case of these digital-centric laws that enforcement will become too close to being perfect as, without the need to hire watchful people, there is strong incentive to make it ever-present.
Or maybe not, but that is why the question was asked.
This sort of ban is the same as existing laws banning the sale and consumption of alcohol or driving until kids are of age they will (on average) have sufficient maturity to handle the responsibility. Something we accept.
Kids are not banned from digital communication. My daughter can still send text messages and make phone calls.
Kids are not banned from the consuming content on those platforms. They simply can't have an account to create their own content as it was too often abused. For example, my 12yo daughter was asked by a friend to message bomb and abuse a 12yo her friend had a crush on. That's mild compared to some of the stories I've heard from platforms like Facebook, and between about 10 - 16 many kids are just nasty.
I believe that the line in the sand over which platforms this applies to is the ones that leverage account history to supercharge the already addictive behaviours caused by UI designs optimised to manipulate your attention and direct your purchasing power towards whoever is paying them. Something kids are particularly vulnerable to. The algorithm doesn't care if it is pushing you towards radical content as long as you are watching it for as many hours in a day as possible.
Why do these services have to lose? That's a choice made by this country's government. They can change it.
That's like saying every government should copy the new tariffs too. If only it was so simple...
> They’ll lose revenue in Australia.
Why is it always 1-way? Australia can also lose people and lose people's interest.
BTW SMS and phone calls cost money.
Sending e-mails was not a thing even when I was a kid, 25 years ago.
Playing video games, yeah well, that may be the only thing where they may communicate. Except that is going down in the shitters too these days. Say "shit" or "fuck" (especially) and get banned from chat for days.
Which city? I ask because I am raising my kids in Chicago. It is far safer than when I was a child and I was under the impression that most cities are far safer. We also have plenty of kids playing outside in our neighborhood. I'm not saying you are wrong, but my lived experience is significantly different.
> BTW SMS and phone calls cost money.
That depends on where you are and what network you are using. That same would go for using social media sites which require internet connection.
> Sending e-mails was not a thing even when I was a kid, 25 years ago.
I was also a kid 25 years ago and we absolutely sent emails.
I prefer not to disclose it (somewhere in Central Europe), but there have been extensive discussions here on HN about how many modern cities have become increasingly hostile to children because their design prioritizes cars over walkability and accessible public spaces. The concerns I am referring to stem directly from that context.
> That depends on where you are and what network you are using.
In my country, prepaid SIM cards still charge per call and per SMS. The alternative is a monthly plan, which at least for young people without their own income was not really financially practical. Back then, even adults did not use these monthly plans, if it was even available at the time here.
> I was also a kid 25 years ago and we absolutely sent emails.
That is interesting, because email never became a popular medium among kids where I grew up. What was popular, however, were synchronous, real-time forms of communication: in-game chat, ICQ, and especially MSN Messenger (I miss those days), and a local web-based chat platform that many of us used. Email, by contrast, felt slow, so we only used it occasionally, for example, when I used it to check up on someone to finally get on Yahoo Chat.
Do not get me wrong, when I was a kid we were always outside, hanging out in abandoned buildings that are long gone now, for example, and I barely see any kids running outside together in groups like we used to. They are probably inside playing games or something. :P
(There are still many playgrounds where you can see very young children playing with their parents. But they are way too young to use a computer or to be left alone, even, so I am not referring to them.)
May I ask where you are from? The contrast is quite interesting, and I would like to hear more.
(That's also not what «walled garden» means. You're thinking about «deep web».)
You know a law is broken when its definition is defined by random people "knowing" where and how it applies.
> This sort of ban is the same as existing laws banning the sale and consumption of alcohol or driving
No it's not. Is every social media platform banned? How is it defined? This is the equivalent of going into a supermarket with a "kids" alcohol section and 1 for everyone else hand-picked by whoever in charge.
> You know a law is broken when its definition is defined by random people "knowing" where and how it applies.
A big reason they are pushing this is Cyberbullying....yet a recent death in the news this week, the kid was literally bullied/sextorted via SMS....not social media.
Without banning SMS and possibly calls as well, it debunks this argument
Pretty sure the internet was a thing well before kids got dumb phones.
The internet has evolved meaningfully over the last 10 years, even. Evolved might be generous, though.
Adults are however also better equipped to deal with that, especially if they have not been subjected to such abuse as children. It is worth noting that online bullying is however not the most serious matter here, rather (in my mind at least) it is the systematic targeting of kids/teenagers to get inside their head and get them to perform violent acts against themselves or others around them.
I seem to remember real bullies would do it to your face before the internet. Not just anyone behind a keyboard.
Juxtapose that with today, where any one bully can create dozens of accounts to bully in a swarm, and the bully has constant access to you from your own pocket. Also, a person in Minsk or Timbuktu or whatever couldn't just come up to your house in the middle of the night to harass you out of boredom.
This "we could do X before computers, why are we trying to ban X-with-computers now?" line of arguments is just intellectually lazy. If a bad behavior was well moderated in the past because it was labor or resource intensive, the sudden removal of those constraints is a material change that demands revisiting. Put another way, if a constraint stops working, we should change constraints, not just do the old constraint with a confused expression on our faces.
Kids know how to download or use free texting apps and sites, giving them access to potentially thousands of different numbers from which they can engage in harassment campaigns. In fact, it's an incredibly common tactic.
Similarly, someone from Minsk and Timbuktu can do the same thing, they have access to the same tools.
Just ban Australia themselves.
> A big reason they are pushing this is Cyberbullying
Oh really now? It has been going on for so many years... A big reason they've been pushing this is it impacts their own pockets i.e. the traditional media companies.
It could happen that they ban all communications, but if you think so, it needs its own argument; it can't hang off the social media ban. Otherwise it is like saying that if they ban children from drinking beer, soon they'll ban them from drinking liquids.
Following your reasoning:
Alcohol is banned for children. How long until they ban all drinks?
Driving is banned for children. How long until they ban all self-directed transport?
Voting is banned for children. How long until they pan all political opinion?
No. Just no.
And yes, I mean engineers. Just a few “inventions” off the top of my head that got us here:
- infinite scroll - Facebook’s shadow profiles - recommendation algorithms
Don’t pretend it’s not engineers that came up with these.
We do that for drugs already. Of course, the correct way to do it is not to try to ban a substance or control supply but simply to ban advertising for addictive stuff. I don't think that works for social media, though, due to the viral nature of it.
The rest of the Anglo world is much less obsessed with government control than the US is; UK is absolutely fine with cameras everywhere, for example, and has almost no protection against parliament. Law enforcement is much more seen as by the people and for the people in these countries.
Australians think of themselves as carefree but good hearted larrikins who snub their nose at authority, and would always be ready to duff a steer or two from a wealthy cattleman for some hungry orphans. The reality is this type of Australian only remains as fading memories in Henry Lawson stories, the few that ever existed. The real Australian is not only a spineless sticklers for the rules completely subservient to authority, with little sense of adventure, but is also very envious of others driven by their greedy and selfish nature.
During covid "lockdowns", Australians were far more eager to tattle on other commoners for breaking the precious rules than they were concerned with questioning government's hypocritical behavior or unscientific rules and policies. It was fine in their minds that their rulers misbehaved, so long as their neighbor didn't get to take their kid to a park if they weren't allowed to as well.
EDIT: I don't mean this to sound overly harsh to Australians, it's not unique to them. What is funny is just their opinion of themselves. At least the British are admittedly subservient sticklers.
A government regulating something is also not authoritarian.
"Government bad" is not an argument by the way, and also not a given. It's just libertarian confusion.
Its a two sided bias, on the one, governmemt authority is categorically bad and on the other you cant participate and change it. You could frame social media corporations in the way, but not, when you are a libertarian, i guess.
Without that, it just comes off as hand-wavy anti-government fear-mongering. It's telling that you used the term "authoritarians", as if any law that's passed that can restrict what someone can do is necessarily authoritarian... which, well, as I said, it's telling.
I'm more concerned with the fact that these sorts of laws don't just affect kids: they require adults to supply government-issued identification in order to use these services, which I think is crap.
You really should think about how idiotic this libertarian talking point is
It would be valid if you had a populace that was educated (implying that when people heard the inconvenient truths, they would be able to parse fact from fiction and not be ideologically driven), combined with a tyrannical government that would be in power and afraid of the general populace knowing that information and starting a revolt.
This situation is pretty much impossible. How can an educated populace elect that government in the first place? If the population was dumb and elected a fascist government (i.e USA), they would just ignore anyone speaking inconvenient truths (i.e how MAGA is blind to all the stuff that is going on).
Secondly, information dissemination is pretty much impossible to stop these days with everyone being on the internet all the time.
The only people who complain about government silencing them these days are racists who wanna push some racist or "anti-woke" narrative, or the brainrotted people like anti-vaxxers. Because in their mind, they live in this false reality where they believe that everyone is brainwashed by the evil government and they are the actually "woke" ones.
The network effects doesn't matter that much for the Tiktok's of the world.
Platforms may offer it as an option but must also offer a reasonable alternative, so no one who is 16 or older is prevented from having a social media account because they choose not to provide government ID. This includes situations where other age check methods return a result the user does not accept."
Edit: > or use an Australian Government accredited digital ID service to prove their age
Here you go. If you’re concerned about your personal data, only use platforms that integrate and use this.
The Australian Governments IT Security is a joke.
But I also think some of the consequences you fear (widespread scams, a mass shift to “dark” networks, extreme social isolation) are not guaranteed. They will depend heavily on how the law is implemented, how platforms handle age verification, and what healthy social alternatives (offline or moderated) are offered. I do believe it’s possible to design a safe system.
Personally, having seen many dire predictions fail to materialize in the past, I don’t view this as either a “clear net benefit” or an “inevitable disaster,” but rather as a social experiment with real potential for success as well as serious unintended consequences.
I support the Australian law and would like to see something similar in my own country. We can’t simply assume an invisible hand will resolve this issue for the better. Still, it’s worth watching closely and following the empirical data over the coming months.
I've seen this argument a lot, and I don't think it really matches reality - I very much expect that the problem users of social media who are teens will tend to be the ones that will want to get around the ban (and will easily be able to).
Kids who just have an account because they are "pressured" to probably aren't actually really using it much or problematically?
And the other problem is that everyone knows it's a silly law so I don't think there will be any less pressure to have accounts because enough kids will be evading it. The ban will only motivate many kids (if you know much about how teenagers think)
Congratulations, Australia, you just drove a ton of kids into the arms of psychopaths like 764.
If you think Instagram and even 4chan are bad, that's nothing compared to the groups that sadly, are usually kids that were groomed themselves, who goad other kids into self-harm, violence and suicide through extortion, love bombing and literal cult shit.
Instagram might make you feel sad, but it doesn't threaten to kill your family if you don't strangle your pet cat and carve CVLT into your chest for a bunch of organized pedophiles online.
This already happens, and I don't see how a law like this would significantly change the volume of edgelords and incels funneling into imageboards
4chan's origin itself fits that archetype, as well. It was created when a hentai subforum got banned on a larger forum, and the community moved over to the new imageboard.
It acts as sponge for more than just edgelords.
Those who do that, are not interested in this ban working, they are the individualists assaulting the community.
> a) normalising people uploading identification documents...
we have technical measures for which there is no need for the end user to upload anything. With oath you can basically have a simple age check; nothing more.
> (b) a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.
You can always minimize the fraction, but you can never make it go away.
> Because it's politically unattractive, I don't think enough attention has been given to the harms that will flow from these laws.
This was a politically bold move and there will be no harms that will come out of it; especially when compared to the status quo.
Those who feign concern about this usually have vested interests into stopping this bill; their "interest" is just another attempt in stopping it albeit with a more "nuanced" approach.
This is dependent on implementation.
From what I have heard (from ConnectID), some sites are using services like ConnectID as a way to have your bank verify you are of age without releasing any ID or specific details.
But I don't think it's all of them, and I agree it's a risk.
I personally think, Facebook and Twitter need to be taken down because Zuckerberg and Musk are using the ppatform to interfere with politics.
it’s a difficult balancing act, and I tend to agree as blocks are put in place, there are very likely two groups of outcomes: the kid gives up and finds other alternatives which can be healthy or unhealthy, the kid perseveres and bypasses the block
both provide good learnings and shape development, but blocking isn’t the answer, communication, understanding, and moderation is
the alternative that one could flood the kid with unfettered access till the kid becomes nauseated and desensitised doesn’t really work either because it can be too risky
the best solution may be something in between, make it a hinderance more than an inconvenience, like the parent post, and go for the greatest impact on network effects, the evil genie in me would make all these platforms super unreliable, spotty at best
but hey, it’s a developmental milestone for the average generation member to rebel against the member’s previous generations
You might not know it or think too often about it, but most "real life" services we use require online identification, at least in Europe. Even on a simple rental agency portal in Germany it's recommended to "verify" your online identity to get more chances. Which means: just do it. Sure, you're free not to do it, as landlords are free not to care about your application at all.
Do you want to renew your car papers? E-ID is there (or whatever existing alternative).
Bank? The same.
In Germany the government[s] are pushing for Digitalization since years, which many laugh at as "ahah, what a joke, it's just filling an online module and sending a fax". It was true 5 years ago. Now I was super surprised because I recently had to do some bureaucratic BS and it's like any "normal" internet service that would require an identification (which is not just via a credit card or so). It's still not 100% accurate or "frictionless" but they're seriously getting there, which is super hard in a country where govt office A won't share data with govt office B. Compared to standing 1 hour in line to get just a stamp on a paper this is light years ahead.
The same will happen to these platforms, because that's the only solution we can think of, as of today. We all stand and watch Facebook making profits off our kids, making them depressed, etc. If you fine them, you're a communist, if you block them, you're a Nazi.
This is the most balanced alternative: you can still run your business here, people can still use social media, but let's not fuck up anymore our new generations, children, teenagers. They are the grownups of tomorrow.
Also, as some other comments mentioned elsewhere on HN: assume your data is already stolen or "publicly" available (maybe hidden somewhere).
I don't think this is much of an issue at all. The path of least resistance, by an overwhelmingly wide margin, is just using a proxy, TOR, or whatever else to bypass the filtering. Sites will be doing the bare minimum for legal compliance, and so it won't be particularly difficult.
Beyond that I'd also add that for those of us that were children during the early days of the internet, "we" were always one click away from just about anything you could imagine in newsgroups, IRC, and so on. It never really seems to have had much of any negative effect, let alone when contrasted against the overwhelmingly negative effect of social media.
I don't really know why that is, and I half suspect nobody really does. You can come up with lots of clever hypotheses that are all probably at least partially true, but on a fundamental level it's quite surprising how destructive 'everybody' communicating online turned out to be. And that obviously doesn't end just because somebody turns 18.
It means the current generation gets exposed to a lot of toxic content all in the name of driving advertising revenue. In the olden days you could get everything, but it wasn't forced down your throat, or rather your reels.
You watch something, you like it, then you get all the time similar things.
Simple example: you click on a post about vegetarian meals. Then the next you see is cows ending up in a slaughterhouse. And then etc.. In less than a week, your posts are all about "why become a vegan".
The end effect is that they shape our children culturally, and it's very hard to explain what is true vs what is fake. Or why something is right vs wrong. They are just not there yet.
‘Fringe networks’, and ‘off the radar’ feel like a very negative framing for a kind of smaller, more intimate, and often pleasantly communal feeling internet that I quite like!
Old fashioned online forums—maybe even Hackernews itself?—would likely fit into this ‘fringe’, ‘off the radar’ internet, and yet, it still feels much less toxic here than it does on twitter.
> The real problem is social media. Their machine learning algorithms are optimised to boost toxic content
…and you need a massive network to enable this, right? You can’t do it without the money, and the volume of content, that the giants in this space have.
If this just pushes kids onto the small web—sure, it’s not _all_ wholesome—but at least it’s not as carefully, as deliberately manipulative.
Remove those apps that make you do so, and the world becomes a little bit brighter over time. I did it years ago with FB apps (which was draining battery while unused, typical fb crappy engineering when they can't even snoop on you in more subtle ways) and have 0 need to put anything there. I can check FB on desktop if I need to, and do so rarely due to lack of any actually interesting stuff there.
Same can go for any other social cancer out there.
I've been grappling with this all afternoon and I still cannot determine what my stance on this.
I grew up when the internet was a bit of a wildwest, and I've definitely seen things online that I wish I never had without my consent.
But there's also a bizarre thought that mayb exposure to this isn't such a bad thing because it keeps us human, and aware of privilidge and our safety - and why that is such an important thing to think about
I'd equate it at some level to seeing the inside of the production of food and being put of eating meat, or eating anything non-organic again.
I'm not sure I would like my own children to see it, but I'm hyper aware of what conflict and crime looks like as a result.
Comparatively to social media at least I was making a choice to click on something risky or that I would not like to see rather than having a algorithm choose for me. Not sure if I am just becoming a middle-aged tech dinosaur though.,
When someone wanted to do something counter-culture (i.e the *chan websites), there was actually a shared interest behind it. People would spend time making content and actually doing things on the web.
These days, internet is so ubiqutious that the majority of the users are simply consumers. There is no drive to build anything. Modern day kids aren't going to be spending time trying to figure out how to get around social media bans with technology, because most internet users simply just don't care enough to organize and build something.
And then there's the issue with ourselves even. We pretty much all do, say, and believe dumb things when we're younger. It's just a part of growing up. But I can't imagine what life must be like if you mix this reality with social media. Not only does this then stay attached to you forever, but pretty much anything can be artificially reinforced. With both factors probably working to impair general maturation.
These are all just consequences of 'normal' things that you'd have even if we managed to censor 100% of vice on the internet, and it's still quite awful.
This law in Australia explicitly prohibits companies from using ID document verification for their age gating specifically because of concerns like this
1. Kids are already moving to platforms that are not included in the ban, groups of friends will choose their own apps to make their group home, including Russian and Chinese apps ( already happening now)
2. Some kids have found ways around the included platforms...not surprising
3. One of the reasons they are spruiking is to stop Cyberbullying. Its ironic then that a big problem in schools across the country is physical bullying in the school grounds, with the educational authorities doing nothing about it. I know this one to be fact and have multiple instances that I personally know of where it happens and no action is taken. Our Government doesnt want to know about this at all
4. The platforms that have been banned are mostly "Big Tech" something that our Government hates with a passion, while many others go untouched. Discord is not included nor Telegram (how are these not social media, they literally allow people to socialise). I feel this is more of a weakening jab at Big Tech by our government to "stick it to them"
5. Day 3 and its pretty ineffective so far. There are many under 16's still have accounts on the blocked socials, and within the Family circle the only one that has been banned is actually 17, having her Instagram blocked ??? so not an awesome start at all.
«Big Tech» is a bad term to use IMHO, but if you do, why wouldn't it cover Discord(/Tencent) or even Telegram ?
It's also important uploading to where. To Facebook. And the bulk of advertisements Facebook runs are literal (with literal meaning of the word literal) scams. And they are powerless[1] to stop it.
[1] not incentivised
Soo... we already have a problem with some youths running into extremist content on Facebook, TikTok, Telegram ... no "fringe" network needed.
I ask if those harms are worse than what social media has done to a generation of young people?
I fully support this ban and even restricting online time marginally, tbh, until they're adults. The internet is not the place it once was. The primary focus of the internet today is to entrap you and monetize you at any cost. Social media is absolutely vile and ruinous for the development of young people (it's not helping adults either, mind you).
A good law would just have completely banned these platforms from the country. (Even the Canadian Kik, because freeware, therefore closed source, therefore a platform.)
I wish the EU would be bold enough to do this, especially with Trump's bullying, but I have already been disappointed in the past, despite the situation clearly calling for strong actions like these...
The antisocial media may be irrelevant, but I still fail to see why a government should be able to proxy-control the flow of information. So I am totally against this. I am also against antisocial media, but I don't see why a government actor should filter and censor information here.
Consistency at school means more and more parents and families are practicing their internet exposure the same way as well.
How this is being done might not be the greatest, and it might change how social media is used, or invite the next thing after social media. Most platforms have dreamt of being a users core identity service as well and that might be it.
The multiple independent studies that show the effect on children developing brains from scrolling and screens alone, let alone the content (be it social media etc) is something worth offering an approach to as well, parents can't be expected to be DIY and self-educate against the types of software that are so optimized to achieve their independent objective of the software - keep us using them.
That said, I fully support laws that ban phones at school, I chose my kid's school because they do not allow any electronic devices on campus outside the computer lab where kids can go to to do research. Every day when I bring my kid to the school bus, I see that children say hello to each other and start chatting. There's another very well ranked school that picks up kids in front of my apartment and they allow phones. The kids all stare fixedly on their phones as soon as they sit on the bus. Having a country wide ban of mobile devices in all schools would I think serve most of the same purpose as the social media ban while having a lot less externalities.
My concerns about this are that it will lead to
(a) normalising people uploading identification documents and hence lead to people becoming victims of scams. This won't be just kids - scammers will be challenging all kinds of people including vulnerable elderly people saying "this is why we need your id". People are going to lose their entire life savings because of this law.
(b) a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.
Because it's politically unattractive, I don't think enough attention has been given to the harms that will flow from these laws.