But the right answer is still to ban advertising. And I don't mean just to those under 16.
Banning platform owned advertising on social networks is already impossible. If you have any concept that is broader than that, rest assured trying it will create a dystopia that still has advertising.
I think its fairly obvious why there are certain age restrictions for younger groups of people as they are more vulnerable.
I agree. It's purposely addictive and harmful to peoples' mental health.
The current situation is akin to having absolutely no regulations on cigarettes.
Personally, I'd take it a step further and ban targeting algorithms for all ages and pair that with strict data privacy laws that make the entire user data industry collapse.
On the idea that this is needed to “protect children” it is the job of parents not the state to decide what media their children consume. If you want to make that easier for parents then regulate and mandate parental controls and make sure parents always have the choice.
You may argue that the approach is bad (I would agree) but it's not because of some evil mastermind plot.
https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...
> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”
Please do share that information.
You could still argue that ID checks are done to partition content by underage/adult which for many is a reasonable thing to do absent any better solutions.
We're all scrolling through algorithmic feeds on walled gardens owned by some of the greatest capitalists in history. Domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns are not uncommon, and have affected election results and fomented atrocities (as in Myanmar). The US, which birthed most of these technologies, has grown more imperialistic and conservative since their adoption.
EDIT: I saw your edit. I agree that enforcing an industry-wide standard for parental controls, preferable one that can be set per-device and must be respected by all social media services, is the right way to do this. Internet ID laws are dystopian insanity.
What does it mean for the 1st to apply to the algorithm? For example, who would have to do what in order to violate the algorithm's 1st amendment rights?
You should learn to appreciate the nuance of opinions that differ from your own if you actually want to, you know, convince anyone of anything.
They are fascists if they want to prevent everybody else's kids using social media just because they're too shitty parents to teach their own kids that sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me.
In practice I haven't seen much useful political discourse by the average person, but as long as we don't selectively amplify voices through machine signals and they NATURALLY accrue followings then whatever I guess.
The world will be better for it.
Maybe someone can help me there, but I fail to see neither the inherent public good of it nor the one of any service that requires it to function.
Yet my motherland, the nation with arguably the most liberal social media in the world and the least functional school system among "western regimes", is the most socially polarized, has voted in an insecure bully on a platform of hate and prejudice, and is about to plunge into imperialistic conquest, possibly against our allies for 70 years. I can't see how age-gating social media can do any more harm.
Its the least functional because its the most dedicated to erasing history and promoting pro state propaganda.
Sounds like you're complaining that these measures will make it hard for authoritarian governments to astroturf young western people so that they radicalize and hate each other more.
I don't think Europe and the US share enough values to do it on a lot of fronts, so perhaps that will shield me as an American.
But it seems like a lot of that coming down the hatch for most of Europe.
Coming up with similar laws could just be convergent evolution rather than coordination.
You also can’t discount that once one country has tried it others that we’re considering similar legislation are much more likely to take the plunge if the outcomes in the first country aren’t negative
There are still other means to chat with other individuals or groups that don't involve social media.
AIM/ICQ didn't rot our brains or attention spans.
If you want to be bold and imaginative, although doubt this would ever pass, any platform that focuses or allows user content, should not be allowed to show advertisements. Then the incentive to have people stay more to watch more ads would disappear.
Infinite scrolling, algorithm based (not timestamp-based), "stories" (short videos), public (non-friend) accounts make up most of the feed, ads selling views and therefore companies trying to capture attention.
A car enthusiast forum is not doing this. phpBB sites get a pass. YouTube is, though. I think YouTube is part of the brain rot, although not the comments section.
FB, Instagram, X, tiktok, YouTube, Snapchat, etc.
Youtube promoting shorts is bad.
A youtube long-form video about, say, car repair, or quantum physics, or a history of eastern asian languages doesn't contribute to brain rot.
The Chinese, take it for what it's worth, knew how to control TikTok. They simply banned non educational content on the platform. You want to watch a 5 minute video explaining the basics of a math theorem, or explaining a chess opening? Sure, that's cool. Stupid 30 second clips of dances, memes, reactions, etc? Nah, that's dumb.
As we can see anywhere and everywhere, moderation teams have to use their power, even when nothing is in violation of the rules. They'll start policing more content, and pretty soon they'll be arresting people.
Like they have in the UK--police arresting people for content. The police don't work for Facebook, I'm sure you realize.
Because unlike the US, where there are effectively no real consequences for companies that skirt the law, in China, the companies wouldn't dare try to skirt the law - executives in China know they can't bribe their way out of deliberately pissing off The Party when it comes to education.
Interesting to me is that I pay for youtube premium so I don't see any ads. They even have the jump ahead feature where you can skip in video project promotions. It's the most ad free experience I have on the internet. The comment sections are about the lowest of the low knuckle draggers and outright dimwits.
I'm also a bit out of touch because I quit all social media. Youtube shorts is about the closest I get and that's a mind sink for sure. [Edit: and hacker news which I consider social media without the ads]
I think YouTube shorts is exactly the experience we're talking about. And the youth watch it by scrolling up, not by selecting shorts that look interesting.
I resisted shorts for a long time, but I watch them now as well. Prefer them, even.
The fact we're not seeing ads, and that the comments are atrocious content, is irrelevant--our attention spans are at stake, not our wallets.
> "Addictive feed" shall mean a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users of a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, either concurrently or sequentially, are recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information associated with the user or the user's device, unless any of the following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another:
> (a) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on information that is not persistently associated with the user or user's device, and does not concern the user's previous interactions with media generated or shared by other users;
> (b) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on user-selected privacy or accessibility settings, or technical information concerning the user's device;
> (c) the user expressly and unambiguously requested the specific media, media by the author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (d) the user expressly and unambiguously requested that specific media, media by a specified author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to pursuant to paragraph (c) of this subdivision, be blocked, prioritized or deprioritized for display, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (e) the media are direct and private communications;
> (f) the media are recommended, selected, or prioritized only in response to a specific search inquiry by the user;
(> g) the media recommended, selected, or prioritized for display is exclusively next in a pre-existing sequence from the same author, creator, poster, or source; or
> (h) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is necessary to comply with the provisions of this article and any regulations promulgated pursuant to this article.
I looked into it briefly and the following two is what I found. The rest seemed to just be repeating or debunking these two claims.
1. An infographic that claims we went from 15 second attention spans to 8 seconds attention spans (as opposed to a goldfish having a 9 second attention span (how was this measured?)).
This seems BS.
2. A study that measured how long knowledge workers spent on a single screen. This dropped from 250 seconds in the early 2000s to 72 seconds in 2012 and 47 seconds more recently.
This data shows something, but I think connecting this to attention spans 1:1 doesn't seem quite right. It could just as well be that people work differently now. Eg they're more likely to pull information from another screen or document than they used to be.
Your attention span is quite short.
This. If western “liberal” “democracies” are concerned about children’s privacy then we should push back on surveillance capitalism, not force people to submit government id in order to express their opinion online.
Is this a US thing? Maybe it's because your Overton window is flying miles beyond the right-end of the spectrum and you lost touch to what "left" even means?
Good thing people give a shit about teachers and pay them properly so everyone is eager to become a teacher in order to address that bias. Instead of idk, leaving it entirely as it is and just whining in a partisan fashion about how education has some sort of bias. I mean education has a lot of women who are teachers and the GOP don't appeal to a lot of women because they want to ban abortion and shit like that. So that'd probably explain it simply enough. In terms of priorities what if the massive funding went into teaching instead of recruiting for ICE? Shows to me what's important to people.
Tbh, I don't think minors need to be angry about misinformation about migrants (which is what I got in like 5m last time I created a fresh twitter account), they can wait until they're old enough to vote. They'll still fall for that shit all the same, so there's no need to be upset about it. Might as well ground our kids for their first 16/18 years before unleashing the Nick Fuentes community on them.
they can socialize online perfectly fine. Excluded from the ban in Australia are among others, WhatsApp, Discord, Steam and Facebook Messenger. TikTok, Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers.
>Also shouldn't we ban MTV and rock and roll music in general?
No, because there was never any evidence that rock has harmed the youth. Jonathan Haidt, author of this piece, has conducted extensive research to show that social media does.
By peers do you mean people they know in person or demographic peers?
I'm not going to anecdata [edit: then I do] but on platforms like Facebook I only have friends that I know personally (or at least when I used to use it). Twitter was the opposite.
Oddly the most online abuse I've had is during in game chats and providing open source software but I digress...
The "rock and roll" thing is because "think of the kids" is a perennial siren call. Only sometimes is it valid. I can't speak for everyone but there seems to be a consensus that "social media" can be deeply harmful for some young people and we should not ignore it. That this one guy made a study and it happened to support his hypothesis isn't enough for this one voter to want to ban online networks of pesky teenagers calling each other names and buying stupid crap.
Is google docs social media? It certainly has social features and I've been witness to cyber-bullying via a shared google doc.
What about Spotify? It has social features far beyond just sharing playlists
WhatsApp? Discord? MMS?
1: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GVO7sNuCNmNwqVK64PHQ...
Sorry but I don't consider WhatsApp to be in the social media category since it's just a chat app for your contacts, not an A/B algorithmically driven carousel of media to keep you hooked in and for strangers to hit you up (unless they have your phone number). However I do think Meta will try to slowly make it a social media app.
If a classmate is sending you slop memes, then it's human curated content from an acquaintance, and not algorithmically driven, unless you consider your friends bots.
1. a user is shown new content based on extensive profiling and a secret algorithm that the user does not control
2. a users activity can be discovered and tracked by people that intend to take advantage of the user
3. the operation of the site is optimised for addiction (or more euphemistically "attention")
I absolutely don't think that a book club or a kids own website comments or person to person chat systems should be included in the rules.
Note - I'm not saying these things should be banned, just that I think it's reasonable to restrict their use to adults.
In reality, a large enough group of people on the internet starts to turn sour. Especially with anonymity. Especially without a specific purpose like a book club. Especially without moderation.
Small groups where you know everyone is where it’s at. To avoid internet stalkers and bullies, and for general quality of the community。
Our brains are built for small communities, not billions.
Like the negatives of social media aren't just isolated to just kids and while shielding them from it is generally a good thing it still seems like putting duct tape over a giant crack in the foundation.
If kids really want to use social media, they'll find a way. Its more about making it hard/impossible for those who haven't yet grasped their agency. As ever, its about electors and in this case: parents.
We're 6 months away from the news report about "the new thing kids are using on the Internet" but the open propaganda and AI forgeries on Twitter and Facebook will continue to do their work on everyone else.
If burning HN to the ground deleted Facebook and Tiktok out of existence, then let it burn.
That's the most important perverse incentive. Others can be dealt with later.
Social media "feels" like it should be uniquely bad for children but the evidence is low-quality and contradictory. For example, high social media use is associated with anxiety and depression, but which direction does that relationship run? Meanwhile there are documented benefits especially for youth who are members of marginalized groups (e.g. LGBTQ). Don't get me wrong, I think there are a lot of problems with the big social media companies. I just think they affect adults too and that we should address them directly.
But setting that aside, the practical implications of age gate laws are terrible. The options are basically to have an LLM guess your age based on your face, or uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope they are stored and processed securely and not reused for other purposes.
But OK let's assume social media is always bad for kids and also that someone invents a perfect age gate... kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse?
Here's Nature reviewing his book:
> Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers
> These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.
There are a lot of problems with the way these platforms treat adults too. I think an age gate is the wrong solution and in many ways it doesn't go far enough.
Here's his rebuttal to that article: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi....
I think you'd struggle to find someone more earnestly trying to get an unbiased understanding of the reality of this topic.
Why did one study in Spain find an association with the rollout of high speed internet, but a much larger international study specifically looking at Facebook usage did not? Seems like that one should even more directly measure what’s alleged to be occurring.
Some will. But I bet a lot of kids "have to be" on Instagram/TikTok/etc because everyone else is. I don't think they all gonna flock to 4chan because they got locked out of the big platforms.
Then I'd argue you haven't actually been to the darkest corners of 4chan.
Those aren't the only options. See the comments on almost any of the many other discussions of age verification on HN for details of ways to do it that do not involve giving any sensitive information to sites (other than what you explicitly trying to give to them, like your age being above their threshold) and do not involve guessing your age via LLM or any other means.
It involves your government issuing you a signed digital copy of your ID documents which gets cryptographically bound to the security hardware in your smart phone (support for other hardware security devices is planned for later).
To verify your age to a site your phone and the site use a protocol based on zero-knowledge proofs to demonstrate to the site that your phone has a bound ID document signed by your government that says your age is above the site's threshold, without disclosing anything else from your ID document to the site.
This demonstration requires the use of a key that was generated in the security hardware when the ID was bound, which shows that the site is talking to your phone and that the security hardware is unlocked, which is sufficient evidence that you have authorized this verification to satisfy the law.
Note that your government is not involved beyond the initial installation of the bound ID document on the phone. They get no information on what sites you later age verify for or when you do any age verifications.
You cant honestly expect people to ignore the actual real world implementation right? Its not disingenuous to discuss whats actually been inflicted upon a full populace in favour of a test?
Not to forget that the UK was making lists of those it was providing digital licenses to. And that the UK has a history of leaking data like a sieve. The government making a list of known digital ID users can be coloured the same way.
Not to mention that not everyone will end up with a supported cryptographic device will they? Are we expecting this to run on linux without TPM 2.0? Lots of recent Linux migrants are there to avoid TPM 2.0 requirement. You keep mentioning hardware security, so I suspect its not going to be as easy as loading a certificate. Or even if extra methods for edge cases will be supported at all.
But its all still hypothetical anyway. We have an actual implementation to dissect. One that the Australian government is actively trying to sell to other countries.
They could point out that the EU system has been in development for years, with numerous expert reviews, all in the open with reference implementations of the protocols and apps for iOS and Android all on Github under open source licenses.
They could also point out it has been tested extensively in a series of field trials involving a large variety of sites and a large number of users, with the last two field trials scheduled to finish this year.
By simply waiting and making that the system they use they get a much more secure and privacy preserving system than what they would get otherwise, with others having already done the hard cryptographic parts and figured out usability issues and developed the apps. That's way better than going with some system that nobody was thinking about until they started working on legislation.
They could also point out that the sites they want to require age verification on will almost certain be supporting the EU system when it comes out. That's because the EU is requiring that member states that implement age verification laws require that sites accept this system. The state can allow or require accepting other system, but this one will be the one that works everywhere.
Countries that wait for the EU system and use it will then have an easier time getting companies to implement age verification in their country since those companies can simply use the same software they will be using in the EU.
As far as having a suitable device goes, in the EU somewhere in the 95-98% range of non-elderly adults have a suitable smart phone. It's higher the younger people are and is going up. Same in the US. In Australia it is around 97% of adults.
The EU is planning on later adding support for stand-alone hardware security devices which should cover those without a smart phone.
As far as government leaking lists of who has a digital ID, that's likely to be a list of most adult phone users. The overall system is not just a privacy and anonymity preserving age verification system. It's a digital wallet for storing a digital version of your physical ID card.
People will likely use it in most places they use their physical ID cards. People tend to love being able to use their phones in place of physical cards (all cards, not just ID cards), and will be getting it even if they never intend to use any sites that require age verification.
A leak that says "tzs has a digital ID on his phone" (if my country were to adopt such a system) would be about as concerning as a leak that says "tzs has his auto insurance card on his phone" or "tzs has a credit card on his phone". (This is also way car companies that let you install a digital key fob on your phone often make that a feature only on higher end trims even though it requires the exact same hardware as the lower trims. Enough people like the idea of not having to carry around the key fob that they will go up a trim level to get it).
If people can't get their government to delay until such a system is available they should be trying to get the law to include a provision that when such a system is available the government will support it and sites will have to accept it. That way they eventually get a privacy preserving option. That's a more likely way to work to get eventual privacy than trying to pass separate legislation later to add it.
Not doing it at all, is even better again.
Wow, the EU is really going hard on innovation.
I suppose the nice thing is that the dystopia has already been explored by science fiction quite well.
We should fix the actual problem (engagement driven social media) which causes polarization under adults too. This is just window dressing and gives more personal data to governments and advertisers.
And no I really don't want it. Give parents the tools to manage better and make sure the worst toxic traits of social media are banned (the EU could do this under the DSA/DMA) and there is no need to ban it for all minors then.
I'm sure it will come but I will oppose and work around it as much as I can. I don't think age verification should exist at all.
Privacy-respecting, free, even technically superior options are regularly overlooked in favor of invasive and locked down options. See how often phone 2FA is forced "for security" when generic TOTP authenticators or passkeys could do better. Also see how specifications around passkeys are being set up to eventually squeeze out free implementations in favor of Google and Apple.
If you need to use your ID to log into a website (even if the website doesn't get any of your information) then society is only a step away from the government monitoring everything you do online. And at that point it's up to them to decide whether they want to do it or not, because you're already used to the process. If they decide to violate your privacy there's nothing you can do about it other than vaguely point at privacy laws before promptly getting ignored.
Every generation seems to pick their moral panic and then engages in "unintentional concern trolling" over it. The people mean well, but low quality evidence shouldn't be good enough to condemn things.
Serious question, given it kinda feels like Meta's been acting like cigarette companies back in their heyday, while X is acting like it's the plot device of a James Bond villain.
I stopped engaging in such discussions. There are some people who are reasonable and make sense, but the rest are just outright batshit crazy. They want more restraints, more censorship, more anti-privacy crap? Or they equate "good" with addictive? Come on.
Is the concept of a game just being fun that alien?
Because I can hardly imagine 70% of people in a train reading comic books. Guess what 70% are doing in the train in 2026?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/24/teens-and...
It’s addictive like smoking. Addictive algorithms take away agency. I don’t think there are a lot of kids wishing they read less comic books, or played less DND (there may be some percentage wishing less video games). But it’s not like a classic generational divide where parents don’t understand it and teens are fighting for this stuff, a lot are against it themselves!
I think couples' X could be interesting. But I'd prefer free association (possibly VR?)
Go to local liquor store. Present ID. Purchase $1 anonymous age verification card. Problem solved. (Card implementation left to reader.)
> kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse?
We used to have to visit a separate forum per community/topic/whatever. There was no realtime feed shoving posts in your face. No algorithm optimizing for engagement. How was that not better?
I don't want "papers please" to be normalized. If the smart ID can do anonymous attestation of age then it can presumably also share various details with a requesting party. Next thing you know Facespace 365 is requiring you to provide your (attested) full legal name in order to register an account. I find that to be a highly objectionable outcome.
If things escalated beyond basic age checks that also adds hardware requirements. Would I find myself needing a smartcard reader to do anything online? The friction of needing to visit a bank in person seems like a feature to me.
What doesn't bother me is age restricted content guarded by a low fence. The bare minimum required to blunt the impact of something that appears to be analogous to an epidemic.
However, we're not going to get that because politicians would just say it is open to abuse. Anyone can go to a liquor store and supply alcohol to minors. The same would apply to anonymous age tokens. I don't know if it would be a big issue in practice, but it will in the minds of politicians.
But there are age gate laws today, and calls to pass more of them. A hypothetical better way in the future shouldn’t excuse legally mandating a poor implementation today.
If a given government body can't manage to stand up a web API to validate one time use codes within a few months then they clearly don't have the technical knowhow to manage smart IDs in a secure manner.
My point being that this either doesn't qualify as hypothetical, or if it does, then it indicates gross incompetence to an extent that precludes more complex solutions as a matter of course.
Also if such identification cards are that easy to get, it is inevitable that the majority of kids are going to get access to them. I or somebody else could go across town to different stores, get 30 different ID cards, and then sell them for $15 a piece. And that is of course assuming foreign states and people don't break or circumvent the situation and sell ID codes online.
Sure, you could enter the black market. Presumably that would carry similar penalties as selling alcohol to minors. People certainly do that but at least my personal experience growing up in the US was that it was substantially easier to come by narcotics in highschool than it was alcohol.
Why would a foreign state bother to interfere with such a system? Violations are even less harmful than underage alcohol consumption. (Which is itself typically fairly benign. I will never understand why people in the US make such a big deal out of it.)
If you worry about every possible thing that can go wrong you will inevitably arrive at a surveillance state. Thus these eventualities need to balance the downsides imposed by any solution with the downsides of circumvention or other abuse. In this case all that's required is a very minor but legally enforced speedbump to force the hand of website operators and nudge cultural norms towards a healthier place.
The evidence from device bans is pretty damn compelling.
I am less familiar with the social-media literature. But I believe we have decent efforts at disentangling causation, and to my knowledge all research not coming out of Meta and TikTok points one way.
> kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe
If they do this isn’t great policy. If they don’t, it is. Let’s let this natural experiment play out.
This is just a means to force logins and identity verification on every site.
"Meta’s own researchers found — in an experiment they believed was better designed than any external study done thus far — that reducing time on their platforms improved mental health and well-being, specifically depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison."
Straw man argument, much? Might as well argue "We can't make any changes, ever, just in case something else happens!
We'll address the next issue when/if it happens, same as always.
I actually disagree with you. This was the internet when I was a kid, and part of the point was you had more agency. This may seem counter-intuitive, but I might prefer my kid hang out on 4chan than tik tok all day long, because at least the former feels like they’re making an intentional choice, and there’s not a multi billion dollar algorithm getting them addicted.
This is part of the point. Kids need more unregulated spaces. Your youthTM brought to you by Mark Zuckerberg is dystopian.
This is a thin veiled propaganda that the likes of Zuckerberg quote all the time but is misattributed. Those marginalized group of people had benefits in finding like-minded people online, mostly through forums etc. (side point: same benefit exist for marginalized group such as white supremacist)
But that's social NETWORK, and not social MEDIA. Almost all benefit people that defend social media spout is simply a social NETWORK benefit. The only advantage social MEDIA have is personalized ad, for people that like that. Everything else you get by reimplementing old, boring social network without "the algorithm".
And we can expect 15 year olds to hit the workforce full-time around then too I reckon. Or younger. Imagine 9 year olds stowed away in Waymo taxi trunks with socket wrenches and cyberdecks.
Drinking beer at 16, drinking liquor at 18 for example.
In 2050 people will say "Do you remember social media?" and someone will say "Oh yeah, those online systems where everything you said was used to build a marketing profile of you? Where every picture you posted of your girlfriend / wife / sister / daughter / aunt / grandmother or child was taken by some weirdo and turned into porn? Where our kids hung out and were radicalized by fanatics and foreign powers?"
"Oh yeah, whatever happened to them?"
Profiting via dark patterns is despicable, whether it's preying on teens or the elderly. How many elderly people are fed distorted, sensational news and believe it wholesale? At least our teens have learned to be skeptics.
Instead of punishing the innocent to gatekeep a system that is one of the most important innovations in history, maybe we should focus on the root cause: the crappified, ad-based internet that glorifies "clicks" above all else.
We might have to face the fact that "free" accounts have become too expensive. If the cost of a free internet is a business model that monetizes outrage and addiction, it's not working. I don't love the idea of paid-only access or enforced identity, but applying a single standard to everyone might be better than what we have now.
I still believe in the free internet, and I know what I want to do to build it: Make excellent content. Teach good things.
I want to prove the value of an open and positive system.
Did they really need to push the evil lever to 100% just for engagement? Or could they have pushed back on shareholders just a teeny bit, in the name of long term legislative freedom?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/15/meta-ai-c...
/s
That is how it used to work on facebook But social media was still toxic to teens even back then from the pressures they'd put on eachother, expectations for posting, etc.
That's cause for concern given that people regularly use these apps on short breaks throughout their days, and especially problematic if they're using the apps as their main source of news.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.252107...
Many sites don't need accounts to access, is the account the issue or the access?
Give parents control over parenting.
Youtube should have voluntarily removed shorts and the front page or made them available as a parental control to appease the regulator. When I wrote to the minister they used YouTube's addictive algorithms as justification for including them as social media which I do agree with.
We had curated kids logins with age restrictions, subscriptions, and ad free under premium and also youtube music with individual playlists they used for instrument practice etc. We had to shift music platform. I know we can replicate a lot of this with special apps and browser extensions but this was a single cross platform solution that was working for responsible parents. To be fair it is partly YouTube's fault for prioritizing Shorts and watch time over quality.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/youtube-now-has-a-way-for-...
Honestly, it's one of the reasons I don't want to pay for Youtube Red, why would I pay for "no ads", when I still feel like I'm the product, because of my complete lack of control over the algorithm and user experience.
As far as practical solutions go a cheap VPS and a wireguard connection should let you continue with business as usual. From the perspective of YouTube maybe you moved to NZ or something.
> they used YouTube's addictive algorithms as justification for including them as social media
Did they provide YouTube the option of swapping out those algorithms to be exempted from the new law? It seems like this law was perhaps not a bad idea but the execution poorly thought out.
I honestly don't "get" the hate for YouTube Shorts:
While I clearly do prefer long-form videos on YouTube, in my Shorts feed I see videos that are, well, simply more short-form (admittedly because of the short length they are often more "shallow", but for sure not below some level that I would find annoying or unacceptable (and I think I am fast with such strong judgements)). So, at least judging from my Shorts feed, I can barely see any video that I would consider to be objectionable if I were a parent. It is quite possible that the YouTube algorithm detected very fast that I belong to a demographic that is not interested in particular kinds of videos that are perhaps common on YouTube Shorts and thus simply does not show them to me in my Shorts feed, so I am simply not aware of them.
So, seriously: why the huge hate for YouTube Shorts in particular concerning parenting?
This is probably the most common reason for why our society is in the shitters wrt. laws. I find it problematic that people only care after they have been shown they are affected. Look at any anti-privacy laws. No one cares until they get thrown into jail for posting memes online.
The problem isn't lack of control, it's the lazy attitude from parents who're shocked that they have to actually do their own job of raising their progeny.
They'd rather abdicate that responsibility to the government, who in turn love the idea because it means more control.
We see this same type of argument from the "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps; if you weren't lazy you'd succeed" crowd. It's a stupid argument there, and it's just as stupid here. The world is complicated, and working to improve things from multiple angles is good, and improves the changes of success; for everyone.
> now both parents working
> barely enough to keep up with expenses and chores
> child has no allowance to go out
> very limited spaces to go out for free
> live in a poorer area where safe and nice places that are free require a chaperone
> child's friends in the same socioeconomic group all have similar situation
> computers provide accessible distraction during parents' only few minutes of downtime during the day
> are parents lazy?
And one income hasn't been enough for much longer than 5 years. Especially in housing.
I see a lot of people around me that seem to pretty much hate having kids and they probably did it just because of social/family pressure or something. They always treat them like a nuisance and fob them off with a tablet. Really, just don't have them then. The world is already so overpopulated which is one of the causes of tension (migration, fighting over resources, climate/pollution).
5 years ago single income households were feasible for a subset of the population. Yes that subset has been decreasing for a while. But the last 5 years or so have eroded it so much more.
And pointing at struggling children/parents as the source of society’s ills is a low blow. When there are individual humans who have accumulated so much resources that they can feed an entire country for a few days at a single thought and _still_ have enough left over to live comfortably. You are looking at the wrong place to blame, in my opinion.
I do think the human population as-is is unsustainably big though but I'm not blaming individuals for it. And luckily enough the population growth seems to be plateauing anyway. I think it would be great if we shrink by half or so, life would be a lot easier. Yes, the wealth distribution is a massive issue too, but decreasing this will actually make things worse. All these ultra-rich are just sitting on their money. They have as much money as say 100.000 normal people but they are not buying 100.000x as many things. In fact I often wonder why they care so much about accumulating ever more wealth if they already have so much more than they could ever spend in a lifetime.
But once all the poor people in China and India will want to have a big house, a car etc like us then we will really have a resource problem.
But for me having kids is not a purpose at all. Perhaps that colours my ease with which I dismiss it. I just know several parents that mainly talk about their kids in a dismissive/nuisance way and I wonder why they ever bothered to have them in the first place.
And then you strip that away too, leaving us with our true purpose at the core of everything else - to simply exist. To live and then to die. That is our true purpose.
A stronger solution is a combination of both approaches.
This sounds like a device-control problem. Banning social media and then regulating devices in school should go a long way towards defusing the challenge.
Even with anonymous log-in, the new status quo is a release from algorithmic targeting. (If YouTube is building shadow profiles and knowingly serving under-16-year olds, that can be fixed with enforcement.) I suspect this group of kids will grow up fitter despite the reduced opportunities for helicopter parenting. There are lots of parents who never try, or try and fail, to control and monitor their kids’ online activities. Way more than those who effectively do so.
If they could use YouTube without signing in now, they could do so before.
The whole argument is utterly nonsensical.
Your argument seems to be a false choice between "either kids play in the woods or they play online in toxic social media hellscapes". Yes it is tragic that some components of a great childhood are impossible now for so many children. But this doesn't imply we must now let them play with guns and matches and razorblades.
I have a friend who works with lots of young people whom she routinely tries to get to come to organized events but they often can't make it because they're attending the funerals of friends who've committed suicide. It's almost unbelievable how bad it is. This genie absolutely must be put back in the bottle by any means possible, and society is trying to figure out how.
[Edit: removed reference to whataboutism]
Now that Australia has banned social media, are you going to admit you were wrong? Or just double down and ban phones? If something is "unbelievable" then you better have good evidence for believing it, not just narratives.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
To me YouTube is more comparable to if TV contained anything you were interested in or wanted to learn about, on demand, for free, and accessible to anyone than it is to social media and therefore maybe shouldn't be grouped with them.
Throwing bans at the problem is not the answer. Legislation is almost never the answer. As many have highlighted this will be twisted into even worse control over human thought.
The problem is simply algorithmic feeds. They are just as destructive for adults and society at large. Maybe there can be some general regulation or tooling in this space, however society really needs to arrive at this itself. Governance originates from society not the other way around. If you need governance to enforce your societal "fix" something is wrong with it.
You can not anticipate the next technological impact - and they _are_ coming. Throwing shit at the wall in the form of law is only going to make things worse for that next change. Education and upbringing has to be much more experimental and adaptive.
The answer is get better at parenting - nobody wants to hear that but that really is it. Look how people bemoan the education system these days. If you trust anyone in education it is a total disaster. Everyone wants an easy fix and the economy places no value on time spent in these pursuits. You can't paper over that with naive laws, trying to do so is only going to make things much worse, both because undoing stupid shit is hard and it ignores the real problems.
However the world of woods, wide open spaces, kids with power tools, kids walking for hours with friends and dogs circuiting the beach, caves, forrests and fields very much still exists in many places across the globe.
Kids working for themselves down in the shed making things they can sell for money at a swap meet or market happens here all the time and is a controlled risk - they wear PPE, have knowledge of readily apparent risks and aren't being stalked and crept up on by a netwok of bot assisted groomers.
Got welders, maps, legs (useful for walking), ropes, furnaces, hand tools, old cars, old workstations, soldering irons, a kitchen, gardens, paddocks, saddle making tools, radio towers, .. you know, regular house in the country from the 1930s kind of stuff.
As I mentioned, this world still exists.
I wouldn't mind restricting access for children to certain types of games such as those with gambling (surprise) mechanics. It's a clear example of harmful media that is at least in some cases exclusively engineered and marketed towards children.
But there's a huge market for this kind of writing: it's all the other people that have similar thoughts but not the time to actually write it.
It’s not just the kids, but stalkers and criminals. There’s a reason full driving and drinking age is 18.
For example, Australia blocks Youtube (like you say) but doesn't block Roblox. That's wild.
For Youtube in particular, I think it'd be sufficient to have child accounts under their parents (as they did and still have elsewhere) that limited certain videos but also, disallowing commenting and probably even reading comments.
A big thing we need to do is shut down Internet gambling and, more importantly, the precursors to gambling, which is anything that promotes the same addictive behavior. That includes all those "free" gotcha games that aren't really games. They're daily chores with random rewards and paid boosts to induce addictive behavior.
Apps like Stake need to be completely removed from the App stores.
I also think Fanduel and DraftKings should be illegal. I'm even leery on young people playing fantasy draft games, even for no money, because it's a gambling pipeline.
Oh and putting your children on the Internet as like a Youtube family? That should be illegal.
Algorithmic feeds in general I think are bad but particularly for young people. Because they're designed to induce addiction and "engagement".
I think phones will soon be good enough (if they're not already) to do background age verifications to make sure the user is of appropriate age via the camera and processed locally (to avoid uploading pictures of minors). At some point I think we'll see that integrated into major platforms.
The point of restrictions isn't to be perfect. It's to create a barrier that makes things more difficult. In years past we did this by, say, only showing more adult content on TV after certain times. Could kids stay up late to watch it? Or tape it once VCRs became coomon? Of course. But it helped.
Just like gambling. Requiring someone to physically go to a casino reduced harm compared to just opening their phone wherever they are. It's a bit like having to go to the store to get ice cream or alcohol or whatever your vice vs just having it in your house or even getting it delivered.
I think we as a society need more barriers.
> Algorithmic feeds in general I think are bad but particularly for young people.
Just young people? Have you noticed the trend of political discourse more or less globally? Social media certainly assisted in bringing much government abuse and corruption to light over the past couple decades but I feel it has also had severe negative impacts on civil discourse surrounding contentious topics. Not that things were great to begin with of course.
> I think phones will soon be good enough
No! Absolutely not! Please do not provide authoritarian tech companies with legitimate excuses to lock down the computing devices that we supposedly own! Society has already gone in an extremely dangerous direction there and badly needs to course correct.
Oh great, we're back to the 'destroy the pinball machines' faux-moral outrage. If it wasn't gacha-gaming it would be Coin Pusher machines, or Pinball, or Arcade Machines, or POGs, or Pokemon, or cigarette/bubblegum card collecting or...
//I also think Fanduel and DraftKings should be illegal. I'm even leery on young people playing fantasy draft games, even for no money, because it's a gambling pipeline.
Moral hand-wringing masquerading as ethics. As often attributed to Twayne, "Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it"
//Algorithmic feeds in general I think are bad but particularly for young people. Because they're designed to induce addiction and "engagement".
Ones designed to sell toys, services, or adspace (such as it ever was). Whereas for people of the age of majority (and particularly those in retirement) those same algorithms dictate elections and, increasingly, what constitutes political or domestic 'reality'. I know which I'd prioritise addressing.
//I think phones will soon be good enough (if they're not already) to do background age verifications to make sure the user is of appropriate age via the camera and processed locally
They currently can't do this at emigration points - see the amount of asylum seekers claiming to be unaccompanied children with no birth certs whose claimed age can't be disputed:
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2024/08/27...
With the best will in the world, and the resources and governance policies of a governmental agency tasked with this specific action, it fails constantly. As such, outsourcing it to the tender mercies of Silicon Valley VCs via some App and SaaS solution is farcical.
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/nearly-200-asylum-seek...
//I think we as a society need more barriers.
I think those with the least restraint and control are the loudest to request their current privileges to be stripped away at a societal level, lest they indulge to the point of detriment.
It’s weird that something completely normal like 20 years ago is “weird” today.
I might even make it 18 when you’re old enough to sign a EULA. When did something completely normal become weird?
“What’s next, an internet license?”
Oh please god, yes.
You’re own argument about kids not being allowed to play in the woods in the more seems to play into this idea we should just accept a dystopian world.
That’s exactly my concern here. Trying to solve a problem with good intent by proposing solutions that hurt the overall environment.
And that's fine. We should build the world as we want it to be, not accept whatever shit our era gives us.
This includes changes to some things to how they were in the past (if they were better) and changes to other things to how we envision the future.
My life would've been significantly worse and more importantly I would know a lot less about a lot of topics if I didn't have access to YouTube from age 13+.
I have 2 kids and I agree under 16s shouldn’t be on social media.
But everyone then has to prove they’re 16+
Is this just stealth digital ID cards?
Or am I conspiracy theorist?
Of course this is the intention, or did anybody seriously believe that politicians deeply care about protecting the children? "But you have to think of the children ..." is just the argument silence the critics of these to-be surveillance laws.
Here's a couple of arguments I had to deal with whilst expressing my support for electronics ban at schools including a blanket social media ban:
1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.
I have categorised my opponents, defeating them forever.
No wait hang on.
And then the evidence didn’t pan out. Social media and device use looks like cigarettes the more we study them.
Would IRC count? And considering it's not entirely difficult to set up an IRCd server (you can literally run it on a spare computer or inside a VM), would the state be branding teenagers as criminals for doing so?
That's the idea: the government wants to set up laws to punish people who set up communication infrastructures that are not officially approved by the government.
I may not be having kids for a while yet, but if I had teenagers today I would absolutely move somewhere where it is not legal for kids to have social media accounts. The underlying problem is that this isn't an individual problem, it's a social one! If a teenager's friends all have social media, he is going to be left out! It is going to severely hurt his life. Even if he never watches short-form video (the main component of social media I think is detrimental), his friends will! When I was in highschool sometimes my friends and I would get together and we would be bored, have no clue what to do. Instead of messing around doing random things, a couple of them would just open up Instagram reels and bam, afternoon wasted. If the half the group isn't trying to do something, you aren't going to do anything. Contrast this with before I was a teenager and before phones, I vividly remember me and my friends just exploring and doing random things. It's just a different experience and I think social media needs to be banned for everyone for it to be effective.
The problem rather is that children with parents of very different value systems are forcibly put together in a daily jail (compulsory schooling).
FTFY.
That is the real problem, no? The combination of surveillance, analysis of the surveilled data, very active feed manipulation based on that surveillance, and indirect business models that both finance and direct the specific manipulation.
Kids should be social. They should connect.
I think we do a grave disservice to our ability to reason about online safety by letting "social" be applied to what is largely interaction with adversarial/amoral value extracting algorithms, model-in-the-middle intermediating human connections, as if the result was any kind of natural social behavior.
"What do you mean we need to moderate our content? There's no kids on our platform, so moderation means limiting adults' free speech"
I recall going to a Subway in TX some years ago and making some slightly risque remarks - we are Brits (ooh er missus). We were mildly scolded that "minors are present". The minor in question was 20 years old, we were told.
But the reality is we needed to do something to combat what this is doing to our kids, while it might not be harmful content per-see there are serious effects its having to attention spans, warped perceptions of normality that these algos do to both normal folks, older folks and young children.
What i think the aus legislation does tho is give parents ammunition to enforce good practices on their kids that might have been difficult when "everyone at school uses tiktok etc".
Much the same way drinking laws etc give parents an ability to push back on underage drinking etc. It's illegal is a far easier argument to make to a teenager vs it'll rot your brain.
This is not a black and white issue and those that treat it as such do a dis-service to a serious problem, we need to iterate on smart legislation and controls (zero trust proofs for example) that allow for safe and open internet for everyone.
Most folks hit puberty at around 13. Imagine your parents have divorced -- your new stepfather is very religious. Your phone and laptop have spyways ("parenting software") on them. You manage to get onto a terminal at the public library. You've missed your period -- you're afraid you're pregnant, and not sure how much time you have to do something about it.
There are so many edge cases where the benefits of access to social media outweigh the harms -- but we've framed this as a discussion about selfies and sharing when it's really about free expression, and there are so many dark turns a young life can take that are made darker if they're left to their family and friends to rely on for help.
There's a whole section here called "Ask HN".
What makes you think a 30 something venture capitalist is going to get good advice from anonymous strangers on the internet?
We particularly appreciated the following skills, as highlighted by your insightful commentary:
- great use of false dichotomy
- creative ideation of rare and improbable use cases for our products
- immediate deflection from the large corpus of scientific data pointing at the negative effects of social media on teenagers (don’t worry, won’t happen again, we fired those responsible for that)
- invocation of free expression as the supreme unbridled right even for teenagers who wouldn’t even understand what you’re talking about
- disregard for the societal institutions and support systems that, besides the family, are currently still available for the average teenager
- lack of any figure in appealing to edge cases. We particularly like this one, because it’s been proven to effectively exaggerate the biased edge cases and make it effective against our opponents’ use of hard data.
What a fine, fine candidate! Please send your CV to us. A representative will be in touch shortly!
i got into policy partly by reading eff's deeplinks in my very early teens, but hey, go ahead and assume just because you were incapable of nuanced thought when you were violating COPPA to participate in public life everyone is.
- they dont offer an "algorithmic" feed - underage can only see content from who they follow and, most importantly
- photographs NOT allowed.
I bet 90% of social issues with "social media" disappears if these tools go back to 1990s style internet
I was a kid online with BBS' in the 1980s when I was 10 years old and met many of my best friends that way. I have teens that met their close friends locally online too. This will also just lead to parents creating accounts for the kids. I'd much rather have parental controls to manage my kids account.
And if the issue is bad parents , it isn't the role of the state to be a nanny. Safeguards and laws yes, but this is too far and almost totalitarian. Political parties that adopt this stance should be laughed out of power.
Worse, these authors are not interested in debate, they just delete comments that don't agree with them. Charlatans.
I can't see how preventing someone from watching youtube videos would be a net positive, but if you allow youtube whiteout an account then why not reddit, why not snapchat as that's how most kids i know communicate and organize their sporting events, etc.
Just leave parenting to the parents. And fix toxic social media (the real root cause of the issue) or ban them altogether.
Also what we see here in EU is that some sites (e.g. porn sites who already have to use age verification) demand it periodically, probably so you don't create one and give the credentials to a minor or something.
In fact it's becoming pretty insane here, even my bank and phone provider want me to come in and show my ID every few years. As if I suddenly became another person?? I kinda snapped at them last time because of these retarded processes and I felt bad then because I know it's not the employee's fault but it's just so ridiculous. I'm getting so sick of this pervasive tracking and monitoring in society with everything we do.
We recognise that children drinking alcohol is not a good thing. Adults drinking alcohol is also not a good thing, but that's up to them.
But the countries with the best relationship to alcohol are the countries that also have flexible rules about children and alcohol; most of Europe allows children to drink alcohol in a restaurant with their parents from around 12-14, and order it themselves from around 16. Alcohol is widely available, and cheap. Generally these countries don't experience binge drinking or drunken behaviour, and while alcohol consumption is high, it's not so problematic.
The Anglosphere has way more problems with binge drinking and drunken behaviour, and part of the reasons for that is that we enforce strict limits around alcohol consumption. We have strong age limits on alcohol purchases, and strong limits on who can sell alcohol and when they can sell it. There's a very authoritarian attitude to alcohol restrictions. This means that when Anglo kids hit the age limit that they're allowed to buy alcohol, they hit it hard and binge on it, with all the harms that happen because of that.
Enforcing a strong authoritarian limit on social media will have the same effect, I think. Children will have no training on how to deal with social media, no exposure to social media in limited, controlled, circumstances with the support of their parents. They'll hit 16 and be given full access to the entire range of platforms, and they'll overdo it and binge on it, with all the harms that happen because of that.
We need to get better at educating our kids on how to deal with harmful stuff. Banning it until they're "adult" isn't an answer because it doesn't train them on how to have an adult relationship to this stuff.
"Full access" meaning deanonymized, with a hostile government watching over their shoulders to control online sentiment:
First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. - https://archive.md/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.co...
One could consider taxing the revenue for adds and content show to teens at an absurdly high rate and apply that as a default unless the consumer is prooven to be an adult.
This does not fit my experience:
As a teenager (and as a university student), you barely have any money available. The value in targeting these users rather lies in forming their long-term values and long-time preferences (which rather few companies keep in mind: they are just looking for the next quarter).
On the other hand, grown-up nerds who are intellectually under-stimulated or frustrated in their jobs are quite a profitable consumer group. :-)
Make the change, assess the effects, adjust/repeal as needed (just like everything else). It seems like the kind of change that's well-suited to undoing later, in case of unintended consequences. It's not like we're going to be permanently stunting the growth of an entire cohort or something.
The problems of social media, addictive algorithms and attention theft shouldn’t be blamed on end users. It should be on the companies that design these garbage systems, and they should be held responsible. I know that’s not how it works, but I can dream. Band-aids are easier.
Am I supposed to use ewww sms again to talk with the kids, because they're not allowed on WhatsApp?
If the post is from an US centric point of view, are the kids going to not communicate at all outside school, because if they play outside someone is going to call child protection?
Once we agree to that, then next time, you'll need to upload your ID to do something else and by the way you don't mind proving that you are not a psychopath and/or a sexual predator if you want to keep using WhatsApp/Telegram and other services?
You also don't mind if we scan your private messages now, do you? We just want to make sure that you are are not some sort of extremist/activist or someone who might cause trouble.
The slippery slope is real.
We look down at China, Russia and Iran for silencing the voices of the protesters and dissidents but we are slowly building the infrastructure that will enable future governments to do just that in the future.
Once everything is locked down and tied to your real ID, then it will be extremely easy to suppress view points or things that any government left or right doesnt want to see spread in the wild. What then?
And those who say, well, we should just wait and see what happens in Australia because if it doesn't work out then we can always turn it off or something, my question to you is when have you seen a government go back on something like this?
They’ve built a system where everyone—not just kids—is a bargaining chip. Influence is treated as a product and sold by deliberately creating viral trends. It’s no different from advertising, but much more aggressive. By pushing content through entire information streams and dominating attention, it achieves an impact traditional ads never could.
It’s proven to be extremely effective, so people keep paying for it and pushing the system forward, while brushing off criticism with cosmetic fixes—like banning kids from the internet and telling adults to just deal with it.
I don't really see why we need more government involvement here. It's just going to be ham-fisted and create unintended consequences like the kids in Australia having to use adult YouTube because they can't have a kids account anymore.
I propose, instead, banning recommendation algorithms. This would ensure that only content which genuinely interests people will be shown, not some weird brainrot just because it's popular.
Glazing it all with ‘for the children’ makes it acutely Less sincere, given the convenience with which that phrase gets trotted out. Zero points.
The only consolation in this spectacle is that such abuses always bring unexpected consequences as harsh as the fools were misguided.
But at the same time, I wonder how much of online political speech is actually poisoned by angsty immature low-info teens.
But I do expect it's less than dishonesty. People who are parodies pushing negative stereotypes or dishonest positions of their political opponents.
What would online political speech look like if everyone genuinely represented their own views as well as they could; including admitting when they simply dont know. Might be an enlightenment event on its own.