I teach children. You have no idea how much social media has affected their attention, memory, critical reasoning and social skills: the social repercussions will be felt for decades.
And this isn't mentioning exposing easily malleable minds to propaganda paid for by states that see the UK as an enemy, all before their critical reasoning skills, and awareness of their emotions, and how their emotions can be used against them, have had the chance to develop.
I expect this to massively electorally backfire on the government. But in the long run, it will be more than worth it. The only alternative would be to blanket ban phones in schools, although they'll still be plugged into social media the minute they leave.
Tbh I've never understood why a strict non-negotiable ban on phones in schools hasn't been in place. This is an easy win with no negative consequences for adults.
It already exists in the schools near where I live in the UK, but only came into place in some of them in the last year. I was surprised that they had been so slow about it.
I was also surprised it hadn’t been the case. Apparently there were some policies against phone use during class but the enforcement was so toothless and sporadic that teachers and kids alike were ignoring the rule.
Now the rules are firm, universally applied, and have actual consequences. That last part seems to be the key. You can try to say phones are banned but until there are actual consequences it’s not really going to make a difference.
Round here they have a locked pouch they have to put their phone in during school which seems to work reasonably well (although I'm sure not perfectly). It makes it more clearcut if they do find somebody with a phone not in their pouch anyway that they've definitely broken the rules. They get locked at registration at the start of the day and then unlocked when they leave school at special points.
The goal is to prevent phones and social media from being a distraction during school time.
The schools in my district did it. Several kids ran huge campaigns with flyers and news media involvement trying to protest it, but after that died down the response has been very positive.
It’s not going to satisfy the people who think that all children everywhere must be banned from social media at all times whether their parents agree or disagree. It does have a very positive impact at schools.
Oh ok. I agree with you from that perspective - phone are indeed a distraction and should be banned in school. I do find that whole debate strange though because in India, schools (not government) have never allowed phones in the first place and our society has been largely fine with that practice. Nobody has accused any school of "overreaching" or made such mandates a political issue. In fact, my mischievous nephew's phone was confiscated by his school Principal who told his parents that she wouldn't return it till the term ended because they shouldn't be giving a phone to him at his age!
I'm really torn on this. On the one hand I agree with you 100%, whilst on the other I have little faith that our government will implement in a non-damaging way. However, I'd almost be willing to trade some amount of civil-liberty in order to protect us from the rot of social media. If I could ban everyone from "harmful social media" I would, I just understand that's impossible to define and implement without massive unintended externalities.
I'm not naive to how much of a slippery slope that is, and I don't think the government is pursuing this in good faith. Nonetheless, here we are.
> You have no idea how much social media has affected their attention, memory, critical reasoning and social skills: the social repercussions will be felt for decades.
I don't see different results among my peers (I'm 39) let alone older people.
Seeing my family, it's mostly the 50+ that are consistently distracted by phones, not the Gen Zs.
My kid's school bans phones for that very reason. I find the age limit annoying and very easy to circumvent, which renders it pointless. This is a problem, because I agree with the benefits of kids attention not being eroded at scale.
The other potential good outcomes are that (1) make a dent (however minuscule) into current and future revenue of parasitic american companies (2) a next generation of young people growing up not addicted to social media.
The latter has the same effect of trying to proselytise to a grown, intelligent adult. The response is, quite rightly, yuck.
What I find utterly wrong is the method, because this way you end up tracking also every adult.
A better way would be to legislate that minors need to use devices specifically designed for them, so that they can be kept under control, and forbid them to use regular devices.
My daughter cannot drive my car, and I don't need to insert my id card to use it, nor there is a facial recognition system to ensure that I am an adult.
Banning the kids from access social media sounds like just an excuse to be able to track adults.
You seem to have contradicted yourself saying it's OK to ban them and then saying it's just an excuse to track adults. But you're no exception it seems everyone involved in this discussion is conflicting these two issues. How about we just say we're going to ban minors - make that the law, and then figure out the proper technical approach? We're smart technologies here and I'm sure in about an hour we could find a solution.
No, I'm not conflicting the two issues. I'm fine with the ban I'm not fine with how it is being implemented, I thought the example would make it clear.
A ban shouldn't affect the adults (and this is the same for stuff like porn). If you think that kids should be restricted from a portion of the Internet, have the tools that they use check who they are... but adults should be able to use other tools.
I know I'm inherently an optimist, but I assume that society can and will implement it properly. This isn't hard technically but apparently it is hard politically.
Do you agree that parents should be the one protecting their children from this 'propaganda' and internet slop?
Whilst I agree that social media can be overwhelmingly negative especially for young people, dont you recon that the risk to privacy and free-nature / increased surveillance of the internet is a greater problem?
I think they should be "one of" not "the one." You know, it takes a village. And in any event, as others have said, parents have completely refused to participate in the question anyways, so in the real world your statement is not worth the paper it's written on.
Not OP but parental controls have existed for over a decade in these platforms with little to no uptake.
Now that the UK has had 3 major riots in the past 24 months exacerbated by foreign social media bots, it is all the more critical to prevent children from falling into the trap.
The time for the carrot is over. It's time for the stick.
On a separate note, I find it funny that plenty of so called internet freedom supporters are using HN given that it's terms and conditions give YC full ownership of comments in perpetuity.
Apply the stick to the companies and people doing this, you don't think social media was critical in the UK riots? See how even adults are affected by the thing you're proposing controlling with age limits.
Do you really believe parents can realistically protect their wards from getting hooked to any harmful, addictive drugs? How will they ever know if their kids are experimenting with these drugs? The problem is that the drugs are addictive - all it it needs is for someone to try it a few times to get completely hooked to it. And you don't realise it until it is too late.
I was explaining why stopping the circulation of harmful substances, like Heroin, do require government intervention and that parents alone cannot fight it. Your conflation that such drugs are equivalent to addictive social media is something I don't agree with - they are addictive but it's a different type of addiction and the harm is different too (more psychological than physical). That said, I will concede that I mostly agree that "age verification" isn't perhaps the best approach to fight it.
Do you not see that the largest companies on the internet are also surveilling everyone and that the massive troves of data they're collecting about their registered users and even non-registered users is directly and indirectly accessible to governments around the world?
How so? If you're anti-surveillance, wouldn't you be pleased that under-16s won't be able to use the most wide-ranging and insidious surveillance platforms ever created?
There's substantial evidence for harms on young people that go beyond surveillance, but I guess we now live in a society that embraces throw them to the wolves and see which ones survive?
There are tons of products and services that are subject to regulation for children because society has concluded (wisely in most cases) that it is not always possible or effective to rely on parental discretion to prevent harm.
> You shouldn't be thinking of my children, they are fine.
Extreme individualism is in my opinion one of Western society's biggest sore spots right now but I'd like to point out one very practical issue with this approach as it relates to social media.
I can keep my kids off of social media, but social media can still harm them. Your kids can take photos and videos of my kids and post them online without anyone's consent, and use social media to bully my kids.
There is a growing body of evidence about the harms of social media on children's' mental health, particularly as it relates to bullying, and plenty of cases of suicides caused by it.
But I suppose there are other possible solutions. We could enact laws that levy more significant civil and perhaps even criminal penalties on parents whose children use social media to harass and bully. Right now, when parents are found liable for damage caused by their children, civil penalties are usually pretty modest.
If your children, who you say are fine, do something to make my children not fine, you should be willing to take full responsibility for that, right?
> Just teach your children to not care what's on social media.
> It's a mental attitude. We used to be stronger. Teach that.
> People being weak and thin skinned is the sore spot in America, not individualism, that's a strength.
I hope while you're molding your children into strong, thick-skinned individuals who are impervious to everything that happens around them, you remind them that respect, kindness and compassion are virtues too.
How is it “obviously about the kids”? Is it because they mentioned them? I would argue it will impact the kids but this isn’t being done for their benefit, it’s being done to regulate what we have access to as a whole. Slippery slope coming up!
The way this has been pushed through after countless attempts over the past decade, and push back from advising experts, does not feel like it originates from genuine concern for children. It feels like a state trying to wrestle for digital control amidst rising civil unrest.
I know many people dislike this movement but really, I think it's a good idea. Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, but that's gone already anyway. Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
I see both children and adults being manipulated by corporations with "algorithms". Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access
Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state. Now the top voted comment (at least at time of me responding) is an open-arms welcoming of the internet police state and voicing support for removal of the free internet?
How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them? That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too? It's right there in the article. Think about how this has to be enforced: The only way to guarantee under-16s are banned from these sites is to force everyone to produce ID. You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them.
Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.
The slippery slope arguments do nothing. People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
We're bringing it up because it's not being mentioned and we think it's important.
I that once freedom of speech and freedom to communicate and freedom to decent are gone they are gone for good.
I dislike very much that politicians like Peter Kyle and Jess Philips have tried to shut down dissenting voices by comparing them to paedophiles or saying this is just about access to porn.
I'm really angry about this. I don't want to live in a "nanny state" and will probably end up voting for a party I otherwise dislike just get this crap repealed.
Labour, Tories and Greens don't seem to care about personal freedom. I do and I'm fed having politicians and journalists that don't listen to me.
to be clear (and this is kinda addressed at everyone in this thread because it was bothering me a few days later): I don't disagree with any of what you said here. I don't even live in the UK anyway, and I'm inclined to believe the whole plan is idiotic.
What I'm frustrated about is people's inability to have an actual discussion it because they're so affected by emotion (like I said: "people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles"). One can reason about the tradeoffs rationally, instead of by intentionally misunderstanding anyone who disagrees with you and casting them in the most negative possible light, accusing them of wanting police states etc --- and then come to the same conclusions! nothing about using reasoning prohibits the same conclusions --- but because you now engage justly with other people, there's a chance of actually changing their minds.
I am very disappointed in the caliber of replies in this thread. This kind of thing: "Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?" is idiotic. The people they're replying to aren't pro-police state, they're anti-'social media for kids'. They would welcome better solutions to the same issue. but as soon as an angry person misattributes the other sides' opinions to philosophies they didn't espouse and would actively disagree with, all attempt at dialogue---even the kind where you chance someone's mind to agree with you---is fucked.
Yes, on this site but not in mainstream discussions.
I've lost count of the number of politicians and special interests I've heard on shows like Radio Four's Today Programme talk about online "safety" and funnily enough they never speak about mitigating the fall out from that.
Destroying freedom isn't a fucking compromise. If algorithmic feeds are as bad as say, heroin, then the correct response is to regulate or ban them. You're arguing for the Internet version of legalising heroin and installing a physical surveillance state to target the addicts, it's absolute fucking insanity.
We... are... talking about regulating and banning them. That is what is being done. Talking about regulating and banning them. Not
> Internet version of legalising heroin and installing a physical surveillance state to target the addicts
Whatever this is. We would be in agreement that would be bad. The debate is over whether this is that, rather than whether that is bad. Misunderstanding that makes all the discussion pointless.
Once those all decisively fail then we can perhaps talk about "welcoming of the internet police state and voicing support for removal of the free internet".
> Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.
False. The whole point of fundamental rights is that they aren’t compromised on based on outcomes.
“Torture is bad, but not being able to get information out of criminals is also bad. Some compromise must be made.” That’s just not how it works, is it?
Perhaps it may surprise you to know that's exactly how it works in some democratic countries - e.g. India and Japan - as the system does provide some leeway to the police on how they extract information from suspects. (India leans towards physical torture, while Japan to psychological torture). Moreover, Americans are often surprised to know that not answering police questions can in fact harm your defence in court in many countries, and police misconduct also does not necessarily exclude any evidence collected.
> The whole point of fundamental rights is that they aren’t compromised on based on outcomes.
This is false, we generally take away fundamental rights when there's justification for doing so. e.g. the first paragraph of https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47986 (and every other paragraph also; I'm sure there are UK equivalents). We enshrine fundamental rights in order to elevate them above baser considerations, but it's not like a paperclip-maximizer thing where we optimize 100% for protecting them over all other considerations. Nor should it be (for the obvious paperclip-maximizer failure modes).
Anyway, the debate here is not over "police state good" and I'm frankly disappointed in all the commenters who interpret anyone disagreeing with them as claiming that. I for example loathe the idea of a police state and I'm quite sure the people I'm replying to would find I agree with them on most issues related to that. But it is not black and white, despite everyone's attempts at portraying it as such. I would love to hear people's practical, viable, politically-tenable plans for doing something about industrial-scale addiction to social media which do not involve impinging on these freedoms at all.
It's interesting that we suddenly can't regulate anything because of "freedom" and "speech" and it just happens to align perfectly with big tech interests.
The whole freedom and speech shit online is starting to feel like a big lie we have been sold so that big tech can just get richer.
> I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them.
I couldn't tell if this post was satire at first read.First it complains about not weighting tradeoffs, then it follows up with a demand that we ignore the tradeoffs as noise and just push through with the regulations.
You see the irony, right? You're stunned that people can't weigh tradeoffs, then you switch to dismissing tradeoffs as noise:
> People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
Considering the second order and higher order consequences of regulations is the entire point.
You're just waving them all away with an assumption that they will be solved in the future.
Trying to shut down discussion about the consequences of government action as noise is scary. We've reached levels of moral panic that people like you are happy to close your eyes to any consequences and insist we let the government take control and do whatever they want right now, without considering the consequences.
> people like you are happy to close your eyes to any consequences and insist we let the government take control and do whatever they want right now, without considering the consequences.
Nobody said anything of the sort. That's the problem with trying to debate this: you're interpolating this stance into people who don't have it at all.
Hey, if it's irrelevant noise then why are you crying about it?
Anyway, to make it the UK's problem even more, I will be doing what I can to eliminate the UK's traffic to as many services as possible. I have no interest in supporting the small island or it's people or their great red coat firewall.
Over time it's become harder and harder to deny how bad some aspects of the internet are for people, especially for young people. Whether it's right or wrong it's not shocking that people are more willing than ever to entertain the idea of internet restrictions.
I'd dig deeper on the problem though. More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.
Yet we have laws around child endangerment. I'm a big supporter of parental sovereignty, but I also acknowledge that if society operates the way it does, I can't immediately think of a good reason why "mental health endangerment" (which social media for kids very much is) wouldn't be included in the broader scope of endangerment.
I don't have children so huge caveat there, but from what I have heard from those parents I'm close to our child endangerment laws are out of hand.
I had a family member find police knocking on their door because their child was playing unattended in the front lawn in the middle of the day in a nice neighborhood with very low crime. While I completely get that some people find that unsafe and wouldn't let their kids play outside unsupervised, it wasn't long ago that I was a kid riding my bike a mile or two down the road to go to a friend's house on the other end of our neighborhood.
Either we all now live in a crime riddled third world country (aging myself there, I guess its the global south now), or we may have overstepped in the name of keeping other people's children safe despite what their parents think is best.
With regards to social media, that should be something we are making loud and clear to parents so they can make the decision best for them. A close friend didn't let their kids have a cell phone or be on social media at all until 16 years old, parent can absolutely make similar choices if they think it matters.
> More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.
Also yeah? Sure? You may not like that that’s the conclusion. Why does everyone say this like it’s some kind of gotcha? Children are incapable biologically of making good decisions.
But yes, I cannot make these decisions of myself and want the state to step in. It’s way too big a surface area.
I don't say it as a gotcha. I say it to make clear that its an assumption baked into these laws that (a) I'm not sure a strong majority of people agree with and (b) creates further precedent for more government control over our lives and our children.
Edit: why is it you know these decisions should be made but you can't do it yourself? Do you not trust yourself, like an alcoholic avoiding one drink because it turns into 12, or do you not think you're capable of making the right choice at all?
OG internet was not swarming with multibillion dollar predators ready to exploit every single psychological trick to manipulate you for profit. If you can solve this, i welcome the OG internet to be free and open place to share ideas. Let me know your suggestions.
The mistake is thinking that regulation and removing the free internet is going to harm those corporations you dislike and leave the smaller sites untouched.
The more regulations are added, the harder it is for anyone other than the multibillion dollar corporations to set up the infrastructure needed to comply.
That small forum you visit and the chat space you hang out in have to geo block your entire region because their operator can’t take on the legal risk of accidentally violating one of the laws. You are, however, free to move the group to Facebook and continue your group chat on Discord after submitting to the ID verification process of both sites, however. Those are the sanctioned safe spaces that have teams of lawyers and developers ensuring compliance with the laws.
This is the future many here are inviting. They don’t see it that way because they’re imagining laws that say “Kids can’t use Facebook” but the actual laws are going to be written to say “Social sites that host user generated content must ensure that all users are over the age of…”
If a big player in a space is asking for regulation, always treat it as them pulling the ladder up to make things harder for new upstarts.
As an example, look at what Anthropic's response to the US making them pull Fable. They commended the action and said they believe there need to be permanent regulations around safety of released models with approval committees and mandatory testing.
They aren't recommending it purely because of safety, they want to add expenses to their competitors without so much money to burn.
And not just that, these networks are becoming a conduit for all kind of disturbed people to invade the privacy of kids and pollute their world, sometimes convincing them to harm themselves, including suicide. Let's face it, as the internet has become more and more accessible to just about anybody, needing to police the space was bound to become inevitable.
Because it’s a lesser evil, at least in the UK, which has a reasonably well functioning government and society.
As much as it pains me, I’d rather have that than the brain rot being forced on young kids. And you can argue all you want about “parental control”, but there are too many parents who don’t care, plus peer pressure is a real thing.
I also think that at that age all the social media sites are a net negative.
We do, objectively speaking. We have free elections, viable new political parties, working mechanisms of feedback from the population to politicians, and a constitution keeping up with the times (we had a constitutional change just this year).
It doesn't surprise me at all. At least in the US, both major political parties fully embrace censorship and a police state. Sure the disagree on the details, but they agree pretty universally on the direction.
I believe this is the outcome of technocracy. Technocrats need power, they need a strong police to enforce their legislation, and they need censorship to maintain a narrative. It's a deeply authoritarian ideology, and it's infected much of the western world.
Yeah that's a very reasonable hypothesis. More generally, I assume it happens anytime power is centralized into too few hands - they will always want force to keep what they have.
Let's look at an actual case study of a police state.
I think we can agree that a state-controlled paramilitary force executing a political opponent in broad daylight, on camera, is pretty far along the "police state" spectrum, right? This kind of thing is entirely incompatible with freedom, and should be a wake up call for the civil society to weed out anything that led to that, root and branch.
Enter the execution of Alex Pretti. Days after it happened, it transformed into yet another partisan issue, a topic for discussion, something that can possibly be justified. Effectively, it was normalised on the social and classic media. Media that, in the US, are pretty "free" [].
Negative freedoms are insufficient to stop a police state. What stops the police state is political engagement and regulation, and that requires a more nuanced understanding than just "either free of regulation or embracing the police state".
: …for moneyed interests to control and influence. For all their problems, I'd argue that BBC is substantially freer than say Fox News.
Why do you think we lost free internet right now? In my opinion we lost it when all corporations switched to mass surveilance. Now we just stop pretending that social media corporations are not responsible for anything.
>Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
There is certainly an angle where people are fed up with the current state of things.
But generally speaking, the overall HN has been trending towards anti-free-internet and embracing the police state for a long time. I am pretty sure people can run an LLM on HN comments over the years.
I don't think it has to do with optimism has faded. Eternal September means Younger generation new to HN, It is highly likely if we were to do a poll, people under 40, lower age group would increasingly support Anti-Free Internet. This mentality also aligns well with majority of their political believe.
> Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
I suspect it's because people of our generation (I'm assuming) grew up with similar experiences to ours and had kids, and want to protect them. To be fair it's worse now than when we were growing up; I can't imagine how awful it must be to grow up in the age of social media.
Because we've been conditioned to believe that every good thing harbors a dark and sinister secret, that every attempt at improving our situation contains a fatal flaw.
It's a narrative trope, not real life. Come back to reality. It's what Omelas was trying to convey.
There are very likely people who's work is to shill... Also here... If not influencing editors of entire sites even. But they are only needed until it becomes full though crime to even think outside of newspeak ;)
> Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit
Reddit is a cesspool and an example of how we're in a post-peak internet like the OP says. If you actually browse Reddit the way the vast majority of people do now (i.e. not Old Reddit that masks the decline), it's crazy engagement-farming patterns everywhere, and not much of a community any more when many comments are hidden by default.
Most people today just like to fire off one-sentence comments; if you seek substantial discussion, you'll often now stand out as a weirdo on the spectrum, and may even draw downvotes and "lol wall of text bro" comments.
Yes, I follow close-knit little subs off the main page. There has been a flow of users away to WhatsApp groups, of all things -- it's that bad.
“Suddenly”? Remember all the “net neutrality” bullshit years ago that was all about begging the government to regulate the Internet? This has been going on since the early 00s probably. If you’re old enough to remember the 90s and earlier Internet then yes, it’s a strange thing to see, but that ship has sailed, circumnavigated the globe, and been decommissioned.
Why shocked? When the internet got popular and the normies started flooding in the culture of the internet changed.
I’m more shocked in how authoritarian so-called “liberals” have gotten in the last 3 decades. I have to specify I’m a “classical” liberal now in order to not appear as if I desire a police state.
> You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
No, I want more. I want us to not be able to use these sites at all.
The modern internet has become a cesspool. There’s some good stuff here and there but it’s not worth the overly negative downsides. Reddit is mostly bots. YouTube is becoming clickbait slop. Social Media platforms are ruining society.
We need an alternative to the internet. Not long ago, we did not have all these things and it was one of the best times to be alive.
I feel like you only picked the parts from my comment you cited and then decided to ignore the rest. I specifically explained WHY I am in favor of those aspects you question.
Yes, it is what I want. Would it be, in an ideal world? No. But we don't live in that world, we live in reality. You only focus on the positive aspects of the internet and frame it that way. Try this one instead:
Do you not realize that you are being brainwashed by billionaires? Companies abuse your mind, track your behavior, collect your data, all to exploit you. They want to you to become addicted, to waste your entire life consuming their content, to become antisocial and alone.
This is our current reality. So, yes, if the cost is that the goverment knows who I am while browsing to remove all of that from our lives again, it would be what I want.
As an engineer, I tend to view solutions in terms of tradeoffs and not absolutes. 20 years ago the free and open internet was great. Now I think we’ve gone too far. And more to the point, I think freedom is protected by regulation, not by handing decisions over to whatever billionaire won a cage match.
This is the gen-x part of my xennial talking, but I can’t help but feel like something has been lost when nothing is transgressive anymore. Some people look back and say how can a gen x’er who fought against censorship be so pro censorship now.
A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do. I think there’s a sort of weird like - there’s something distopian about Elon Musk putting his stamp of approval on using edgy racial slurs on social media. If you’re young and want to make edgy jokes. It’s supposed to be transgressive! It’s _not_ supposed to get Elon Musk’s stamp of approval.
I don’t want to send anyone to jail for bypassing these laws or saying the wrong thing. It’s a hard needle to thread, but we need a code of conduct so people can make a choice to break it. So people can create alternate websites to the big social media companies. We need institutions without so much power so they can be jailbroken. And government is just plainly not the only powerful institution I fear.
I’m becoming something of an accelerationist on this issue. I think we’re at a dead end with like 5 companies controlling most of the internet. If this pisses people off and encourages them to get active politically or create new modes of communication. Great!
Freedom has to be more than “you can choose any walled garden you want!” We need more spaces that aren’t mediated.
I feel like we’ve accepted this terrible definition of freedom, out of fear it could get worse, not because we love what we have.
But not to worry, I feel comfortable having contrarian views, because my one vote isn’t going to radically change the world.
You're basing everything on a flawed assumption: That the regulations will be most difficult for the big websites, but not be an impediment to small communities.
It never works that way. The more regulations you add, the harder it becomes to have a small community on the internet. The big companies can spend money to comply and lobby. The small communities cannot.
We are already seeing this. There are websites blocking the UK because they can't afford to comply with all of their laws. Even websites that try to block the UK are getting threats from Ofcom for not ID-checking their users: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1rk690v/i_ru...
The end game of your accelerationism isn't a utopia where we're all back to small communities.
The end game is that small communities die out because the only companies who can navigate, comply, and lobby are those 5 companies you hated. You're cheering on the consolidation of the internet.
There’s a reasons I described it as accelerationism. I think whatever the next thing is probably hasn’t been invented yet, but I would hope the discomfort of exclusion might inspire it. It only works if enough people feel left out - I.e. all under 16s
But yeah, it’s not without risks.
But there’s two sort of self-identified reasons for freedom of speech.
One is to get the best ideas on the table. I’m a little suss of this one (when taken to extremes) because speech that costs nothing is just noise.
The second is to make sure everyone has an outlet to express themselves so they don’t rebel. And while I certainly don’t want to see violent rebellion, I think maybe a bit more social and political rebellion wouldn’t be the end of the world.
The typical medium for the internet today, even among many people who would have been computer nerds in days of yore, is the smartphone, i.e. primarily a consumption device. I can't see people becoming so pissed out that they would overcome the limitations of the phone and actually create bold new modes of communication. Just using an alternative prepackaged app like Signal is way out there for most people.
> The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state.
I grew up on that internet too (the freedom part). Do you really believe it is the same internet now?
Gone are the days when one could run their own mail server now because Apple or Google or Microsoft can suddenly deem it as "untrustworthy" or "suspicious" (based on some algorithm) and all your email will end up in spam. IRC and newsgroups have been hijacked by centralised Messengers and Social Media firms run by BigTech. They can ban you on these platforms for no reasons, without much recourse, holding your digital life hostage. Last year, I learnt that the much vaunted "free speech" no longer exists online - I have to fight and waste time with everyone - from the moderators to the platform "community managers" - to publish any factual pro-palestine or anti-Israli-right posts because these are being heavily censored on all western platforms (and unfortunately all English language communities are western platforms). Election manipulations by foreign platforms are also another danger every sovereign nations now faces.
> How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them?
So I wouldn't say that people are being "naive". We don't want to live in an "echo chamber" controlled by western or Chinese BigTech corporates and their ideas of techno-fascism. Not to mention that we really cannot ignore any more the societal and political impact of some of these platforms - Facebook / Whatsapp are responsible for causing many social unrest around the world and even genocide (How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... ).
The negative psychological impact of social media addiction is so obvious even in adults. So imagine how much worse it is on kids / teens - it truly would be irresponsible to not regulate it.
> That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Oh, very true! That is something to be very wary of. And the answer to that is to also fight for stronger privacy regulations and prevent government overreach. Not trust the government or the corporates to behave.
Here, you will have to understand and accept that unlike in America, where mistrust of government is inherent in the political structure (the US Presidential system favoured a weak central government because the makers were distrustful of a powerful Federal government) is very much in contrast to other parts of the world. Europeans expect and have more trust in their governments to regulate some aspects of their society, while the rest of the world prefers a "strong" Central government (and thus it is expected that the government will regulate many aspects of society). That is something fundamentally different vis American politics vs the rest of the world, that perhaps befuddles Americans.
In a democracy though, I don't see anything wrong in "trusting" your government more than local or foreign corporates (or even a foreign country - for all the talk about how America stood for "free speech", my experience with American / western owned platforms censoring my political ideas and beliefs has made me increasingly cynical if they ever truly believe in democratic values; so yeah - I guess you could also say that all this is also perhaps a backlash to current western politics).
> Gone are the days when one could run their own mail server now because Apple or Google or Microsoft can suddenly deem it as "untrustworthy" or "suspicious" (based on some algorithm) and all your email will end up in spam.
Someone should tell my mail server that because it happily delivers emails to Apple and Google and Microsoft destinations.
(I will concede that it is much more of a ballache these days than it was 25 years ago but such is the way when capitalism intrudes with adequate legal oversight.)
Yes, I should have added it is harder now because it now requires "constant vigilance" - receiving mail is easy and fine and dandy, it's the delivery part that has now become a real pain because of the BigTech gatekeepers. It's the same with social media communities too.
it takes very little effort from those who control the media to turn terminally online cattle for/against anything, because they are almost completely uncritical of their side of the establishment. pander to them 95% of the time, and you can use the remaining 5% to push whatever agenda you like.
among the least controversial things I can give as an example without getting silently downvoted and flagged, would you have ever imagined that particular demographic demanding draconian copyright laws? yet, here we are, copyright is good now.
I disagree. I don’t have a huge problem with the UK government monitoring my online presence; I’m reasonably sure my ISP is siphoning all that information to them anyway. That may be problematic for some, but I’m ok with it.
My problem is that this info doesn’t go to the government; it goes to persona and Yoti. We are literally giving government issued IDs to tracking platforms to tell Meta, Google, ByteDance, Reddit who we are.
This isn’t about keeping children safe - if it was the law would be to mandate parental controls on devices. I’d stand behind that law.,
I have no idea how successful the US war on drugs has been and I don't need to, because I am not from the US and the US is not everything there is in the world. Just because one attempt to fight something bad failed, that doesn't mean every attempt ever at fighting anything bad is doomed to fail.
I'm not saying the war on drugs has been successful by any means.
But legalization has also been a really disappointing flop. After marijuana was legalized in my state, it has been really disturbing to see usage skyrocket among middle and high schoolers. A lot of people apparently derive their standards of morality from the legal system.
Nor arguing and I do appreciate your perspective but that’s so odd: vodka is legal and middle and high schoolers shouldn’t be getting into that either.
>Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
The issue is once the mechanism is in place, the government will surely use that mechanism when it's convenient. You need look no further than the Online Safety Act of 2023, which was sold as a way to protect children but didn't even go a whole week before the government was censoring videos for political reasons.
The end of internet anonymity is a one-way door. Once we're through there will be no going back.
Keeping children off social media, or to a very limited children only social media seems obviously a good thing.
My issue is the UK “free” speech standards seem to be something like free speech as long as its reasonable, doesn’t offend or excite too many people, cast aspersions on those in power etc, in other words not very free at all. And any form of internet registration could be used to tie more people to their posts.
Of course restricting posting some benefit exists as we seen in the US with robust free speech and twitter being overrun with third world posters attempting to influence domestic politics.
Isn’t it already impossible to be anonymous on the internet without flawless opsec? I’m surprised there isn’t a TV Tropes article about it but whenever a character in a show needs to be perfectly anonymous they visit an Internet cafe with a baseball cap and glasses - which while it’s a trope I think it also plays on our cultural understanding that significant diligence is required to maintain anonymity.
Edit: though I suppose the counterargument is that we shouldn’t make it any easier for surveillance states, especially technologically inept ones, to perform dragnet surveillance.
There’s a middle ground between going to cybercafes with sunglasses, and submitting a 4K scan of you gov ID before watching a YouTube video where someone says a bad word.
I'm generally in agreement on social media bans for children, but the proposed solution is age verification on all platforms which has a huge amount of problems.
Why can't we just ban the use of smartphones without parental locks for under 16-year-olds instead? That's not perfect but would already be a huge improvement and adults wouldn't be affected by it.
Yes, I sound like someone who cares about our well-being as humans, and I am happy about that.
Do you know how you sound yourself? A conspiracist. If indeed everyone is out to get us and wants to control our brains, then that's f'd up. But you have just as little knowledge about whether that is true as I do.
At some point you have to allow people to see what they want to see. You don't have to make it so that what they want to see is pushed on them, though, and this is what modern social media does. It pushes stuff just because it's engaging.
This is not about the good of the people. And the sooner you realize that this type of regulation will be used to manipulate you as much as what you fear is happening already the better.
The government is an entity that acts to protect itself. It has and always will fear an open and informed public.
majority of parents are in favour of such a ban, otherwise they wouldn't do it
if social media companies hadn't made social media a total cesspit of disinformation, child grooming and algorithmic manipulation then the outcome might have been different
That is pretty much my point. I just wanted to point that out because, next to being controlled by the government, it's the most common argument against stuff like this I see.
> Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago,
social media is not, and never was the "free internet" we all get nostalgic about. maybe the first couple of years was something tangential, but that died very quickly. since then it's been a nightmare-ish hellscape of surveillance, manipulation and hate.
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
anyone claiming something like that is happening here is just spreading paranoiac FUD via a cheap and lazy straw man. if UK law starts requiring me to provide ID just to read rust crate documentation or connect to the internet then that is an issue. i would be very unhappy about it. but that is not happening here.
let's not be drama queens about it.
> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
i've asserted for a very long bloody time that major social media platforms, not the internet in general, should require government ID verification of some sort to have an account. would likely make it far easier for the police to prosecute a lot of the nasty shit that only happens on those platforms.
having said that, these platforms are designed to prioritise engagement and angry, toxic and hate-filled people click more. so it's the platform's fault but as ever they're not cleaning up their mess.
if folks on HN wanna blame someone or get angry then get angry at the platforms for letting it get to where we are today. it's their own fucking faults.
Right. A lot of "Internet Freedom" is just dishonest Anarchism. A thought terminating cliche that halts otherwise brilliant people from actually considering the tradeoffs of policies like this.
The whole appeal of Anarchy is that The State always has the potential to become Evil. So, at a (very quick) first pass - eliminating The State kinda seems like it heads off some bad futures.
While some of the HN commentariat may be anarchists, you and I at least are not.
Strong worded comment but yes, it's exhausting seeing people here of all places arguint against their own rights and the freedom of the internet :/ I guess the fight is already lost. Remember when people literally went to the streets while fighting SOPA, PIPA and ACTA?
Why do you think I'm like the people destroying the Internet? Because I said a bad word? Are you actually retarded? I'd love to return to the Internet we had in the 90s and 2000s, we're not going to get there if defeatist bitches like you cave and let the governments of the world control who is allowed to serve http responses to people that don't put their government ID in the header and route it through a 3rd party.
No, because the people who ruined the Internet were people like you who grew up on it, and then continued on to monetize it. The government was always too slow to be an actual threat.
> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
Adopting the drug prohibition model is fine, if what we want is to lavishly enrich the social media cartels, and visit upon the rest of the world needless crime, misery, addiction, and death.
Somehow all the countries are suddenly proposing the same thing. You'd think at least one of these countries might try something different if they actually cared about the kids, like banning algorithmic feeds. Not suspicious at all.
But so has trust in government (for very good reasons). And those same unscrupulous governments are heavily influenced by the very same tech companies people are suspicious of.
Not beyond the realms of possibility that Meta etc has decided it wants government/photo ID and has convinced governments to implement it
Big tech will act inconvenienced but they will in reality benefit
Just like any attempt by a UK Gov to fix housing: they just make it worse, because that was the real aim (yes I include the latest renter's rights legislation)
World leaders pay attention to the world. Australia implemented the law and it went smoothly. So naturally other world leaders are going to see that as a green light that the general public is on board and the tech companies complied.
I'm probably going down a conspiracy theory, but it's notable when all the Five Eyes countries seem to start talking about the same problem and pushing through legislation. The US would probably do the same if not for the constitution.
Not sure how closely you follow US news, but a majority of Americans feel that the current US administration is not all that concerned with the constitution, so that not really a blocker.
And yet you're still labeled a conspiracy theorist if you suggest that their might be ulterior motives for identity verification in the nation that arrested 12,000 people for what they posted online in 2023.
I'm actually very supportive of getting rid of screens + social media for kids. I don't the reasons I'm supportive of that bear any resemblance to the motives of the UK's political class.
Interesting that Canada is trying to do the same thing. Seems suspiciously similar.
The idea that this is about surveillance is also interesting.
I think it's important we ask: could we invoke this ban without surveillance?
- identity scan is one solution
But surely there are other solutions? Can't you just make laws that get kids in trouble if they get caught on social media? Kids get in trouble for missing school.. there are other incentives than identify checks, surely?
Kids find ways around everything. Even adults find the 'digital wellbeing' tools on Android and iOS useless. Just look at the multitude of apps available for digital self regulation these days (ScreenZen, Freedom, BlockSite, etc). No single solution works for everybody at the moment.
Regulation by itself is also insufficient. But maybe combining regulation with parental controls plus other measures will be effective. A 'defense in depth' or swiss cheese strategy, with multiple layers of protection.
I do hope we figure out what layers are needed soon, though. It feels like we're running out of time.
Regulation does add friction. And it makes it easier for a parent to say 'no, you aren't allowed that app' (which you can obviously say anyway, but it gives you a very solid and non-negotiable reason to say no). Some children will find their ways round things, but a lot, if their friends aren't using a particular app, won't bother, or they will be the type of children who won't try and break the law.
Most apps and sites are terrible in terms of the parental controls they provide - they tend to be all or nothing. E.g. I'd like to have a group for our family on WhatsApp but I don't want my children to be able to join random WhatsApp groups and there isn't any way to have the former and not the latter.
I think the idea is that while individuals will absolutely find ways round it, it should help to reduce the network effect of everyone a kid knows being already on it. How true that is remains to be seen.
One campaign I’ve liked is one in the UK to try and get the parents of whole year groups in school to agree to not buy phones until their children are a certain age. This removes a lot of the peer pressure of ‘my friends all have one’.
Except they are. I’m not aware of any actual bypasses of parental controls on iOS or android. You choose apps and allow or deny them, and you provide limits which are guarded by passcodes or parental prompt (on iOS at least).
> It feels like we're running out of time.
I mean, does it? It feels like we’re running guns blazing into something that will be trivially bypassable (hello free VPN to some random European country - remember Hola?).
Homework requires internet-connected devices (I guess you can semi-supervise that, but it becomes harder as they become older as you don't want to sit there watching them do all their homework).
There is also a cost socially, which is hard to navigate as a parent. If everybody is talking about minecraft every break and playing it together in the evenings, then it's hard for them if they haven't even seen the game.
The problem is everyone else’s kids is on social media. As a teenager I never had a Facebook account, but every other kid did and every event was organised and invites sent on Facebook.
It could have been done over sms, email, or any other private messaging, but because everyone was on Facebook, if you weren’t too, you weren’t invited.
Simpler still, a “minor” bit on the phone, set by parents once. All services must respect the bit in http headers, and app stores should refuse to install certain apps. No need for id check
I imagine that many parent don’t want micromanage their kids apps, this takes care of the problem.
I’m in favor of this, but it doesn’t solve the full problem. If all your friends use social media as the fabric of their social interactions, you’ll be ostracized if you opt out as an individual.
IOW its a coordination problem. You need most of the other parents in your social group to also implement those controls.
I mean, the government bans lots of things for under 18s. Gambling, alcohol, opening bank accounts, getting married are all restricted by governments. I’m not saying governments shouldn’t provide laws on what children can and can’t do, I’m saying that this law is a poor way of doing it.
>Interesting that Canada is trying to do the same thing. Seems suspiciously similar.
Australia already did. Commonwealth countries share a lot in common, and of course a lot of problems are common across many countries.
But let's be real -- these countries are announcing it in lockstep because the US is a corrupt plutocracy, and the lords of the nation like Mark Zuckerberg will run to Trump and he'll have a little tantrum (tantrums that always, it should be mentioned, just hurt Americans more. Everything is in the service of the billionaire class) about this.
It's tougher for that grifter to do so if so many countries do it simultaneously.
>The idea that this is about surveillance is also interesting.
What idea is that? That firms from foreign nations will gather IDs, of absolutely zero value for the country, to ensure age compliance? How does this silly conspiracy work?
Kids motivated will just get around it. But I think it's pretty clear at this point, given the idiocracies rising worldwide and how everything is getting stupider/worse, that social media has not been a net good.
I happened to talk to a teenage relative about this possibility the other day and she said that she'd be fine with a ban. It seems that it's not as big a deal if everyone's in the same boat. Parents genuinely have a hard time navigating this because drawing a line for their own children has the effect of socially excluding them.
It's not ideal in many senses (what age checks are we talking about here) but its worth thinking about some of the positive effects this might have on the young people growing up in the mess we've made of new media.
What do you think this will lead to? Will mesh networks explode in popularity or maybe the adults will just log their kids in - and UK will then make that illegal... But how to surveil the parents then.
Personally I fear this will just become whackamole against communication innovation. it feels to me like an addition in a broader attempt to control communications in general.
When you try to ban people from doing something they find ways to do it illegally. Humans have a need to socialize and kids are not going to stop using the internet for that just because of some law.
Aided by their parents, I'm sure, they will find seedier ways to do this. Ways that are not regulated at all, even by sensible laws that prevent direct exploitation. The parents obviously don't care that their kids use social media, otherwise they would take steps to stop it.
These laws are not going to bring back the days where we all were riding our bikes outside and reading physical books. That's not the way of life for these kids. But it's, very likely, going to put children in a more dangerous situation as they try to find some kind of solution to their social needs online.
Counterpoint - this is a coordination problem, there are studies suggesting that most kids would rather not participate in the whole social media thing but an individual can’t opt out.
It’s very possible that a policy like this could give everyone a new Schelling point to coordinate around, and thus change the default behavior.
We will see! I certainly agree this policy won’t prevent the kids that really want to use an app.
> When you try to ban people from doing something they find ways to do it illegally. Humans have a need to socialize and kids are not going to stop using the internet for that just because of some law.
They’ll do what my son has done his whole teenage life, having been banned from social media by me before he even asked for it, and go out and see their mates in real life !
The evidence of social media causing depression and anxiety in youth is mixed and almost all of the affirmative findings are correlational, so I expect to see a variety of takes in this comment thread.
Personally, the strongest positive evidence I've seen comes from the natural experiments tracking when high speed internet & phones were introduced geographically. Rates of teen depression do seem to topple in very close sync with this, as discussed here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
I still think we're solving social media from wrong angle. We should fix the addiction nature, so we can still use social media for informative purposes. (like hobby forums) Before the big platforms took over, there was lots rich information sources about tech and programming I wouldnt be there if those forums did not exist. Right now its just bunch negativity dopamine hits.
It's still weird how those social media bans are essentially "anything with chat/messages requires age check".
If social media is affecting learning, then ban using phones at schools, it's been very effective all around world with no privacy risks.
I agree that children under 16 should be limited in their exposure to social media but... I am deeply worried this will be used to either limit everyone else's access (particularly in "times of crisis") or may lead to a national identity requirement for accessing the internet. It's a little alarming the tech-minded public has not pushed back on this more.
I asked my Ouija board some questions and determined that:
- Select 3rd parties friends of government officials will be taxpayer funded to verify government ID's and live facial recognition.
- Said data will be "accidentally leaked" and somehow a myriad of 3rd parties and criminals end up with this data.
- People will be encouraged to purchase some form of identity protection monitoring service.
- People will conclude or theorize that all of this could have been avoided.
I have some ideas that could solve this without impacting anyone currently using the internet but there are no financial incentives for government officials to participate thus such ideas are dead in the water.
Can you provide some evidence that it didn’t work in Australia? Given the ban hasn’t been in place that long I’d like to see your sources about it not working.
Limited success might be a better term. But if a supposedly blanket ban only stopped 30% of under-16s accounts from accessing social media, that does seem pretty failure-esque.
This is a story about non-compliance. One hopes the Aus government is going to take some sort of enforcement action. If _that_ fails, then you could claim limited success or failure.
Presumably you wouldn't call laws against murder a failure because there are murders.
US prohibition was a failure. Mass noncompliance. Alcohol was and is popular! Many ordinary people hated the laws.
Murder is not popular. Murderers are thankfully rare, and they don’t comply with the laws on murder. The masses do.
When you make popular things illegal, you erode respect for the law and turn people against the government. You can (maybe) get away with this when times are good, but when times are not good you are doubling your problems. There is a spillover into other kinds of criminality as law-abiding people decide that the law may not matter as much as it once did. Ignore this at your own peril.
When considering how to think about these restrictions, I turn to my 15 year old self back in the 90s and ask him "would you want the government to block you from using IRC, forums, guestbooks, and social web sites?"
His response would have been "go to hell", and he would have figured out a way to get around it anyways. Unless they're actually planning to track one government ID per person in a database, a truly horrifying idea that this project is slippery sloping towards (because if the current design is easily defeatable, then why do it at all?)
Having access to the entire internet, warts and all, as a kid did not ruin my life, it was an escape from the people I did not fit in with in the place I grew up, it taught me about humanity and ultimately led to a successful career for me.
Dave Bohnett, the founder of Geocities, stuck his neck out to protect the LGBT section of the site so that young adults could find a place to have community despite often growing up in places where it was dangerous to be gay, like it was for him when he grew up in a very conservative suburb of Chicago.
I don't think anyone has said more negative stuff about Facebook then I have, and I literally made a platform eager to try to destroy it, but this is not the way to do it. We should be thinking very, very carefully about when we let the government become our parents in scenarios like this when the unintended consequences seem quite likely be enormous and when there's no mechanism for retracting the law once it's implemented and we find out that, surprise surprise, it didn't magically cure depression in young adults.
Social media sites today are nothing like the forums and guestbooks of the 90s. Social media now is highly effective at developing addiction like symptoms as well as driving people to decisive topics and conspiracy theories. It has a measurable effect on teenagers wellbeing and academic performance too.
My bigger concern is the how rather than the why on this topic.
I'll agree with you that I'm far more worried about the how than the why, exponentially more worried.
I'm just not sure if "this time it's different". There was abundant decisive political smearing and conspiracy theories on Geocities. They had an entire section called Area51 (https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51). There was a politics neighborhood that had a bunch of crass political bashing (it's pretty funny to read about someone off his rocker about Janet Reno). There was also the Art Bell show playing in every radio market with him interviewing vampire experts and whatnot. The old Internet/culture really wasn't all that different than it is today.
I don't really care about a ban like this, but I do strongly care about exactly how they plan to enforce it. There are technical solutions which are both inexpensive, would be just as effective, and which would fully respect the privacy of all individuals.
But, regardless of whether the push is well meaning or not, the UK government has a historical track record of trying its best to eradicate the concept of an individual having any right to privacy from the government. A significant chunk of the population seems to even believe that wanting privacy from the government is a signal that you are doing something illegal.
People have been making comparisons to 1984 for years, but the current state of the UK should genuinely be raising alarms. It's like they're trying to compete with China for control over their population.
Ultimately, if a kid is super digitally connected and using social media all day, can't his/her final grades be enough evidence?
I'd like to hear some arguments how we must ban certain technology in school; meanwhile it's plain to see to anybody with a brain cell that there is an entire corrupt stack from state government down to the individual classroom that *students must not be given failing grades*.
Here's a thought experiment: provide an opinion to both of these assertions. The rule of the experiment is you cannot give an opinion to one without answering the other.
Tbh, I think that this is still putting the blame on users and not in the actual tool designed to be as addictive as possible. It's like blaming people who get addicted to cigarettes.
To this I say: Hey kids, go grow your own groups using free/libre open source decentralised, distributed post-blockchain holochain-powered https://moss.social
A lot of reporting seems to state that it's only for "high risk social media". Is that the case? Are they really picking and choosing which social media they will ban for under 16s?
Nice, let's hope they will be using their creativity and smarts to understand deeply how tech works and bypass these or create their own spaces. We have high hopes for you young people.
But under Ofcom rules, it is social media if we are to assume that they’ll apply the same scoping as the Online Safety Act does for user-to-user services. I think a lot of comments here assume that only sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter/X would be in scope, but I see no reason why they wouldn’t use the same definitions from the OSA (essentially any site where user-to-user communication and content posting takes place, including forums and aggregators).
Which was not contradictory, as they were saying they wanted to quit. I also want to quit all social media, including hackernews, in the same way I want to quit eating Mcdonalds and getting high all the time.
The actual ban passed a couple months ago, after the data in your link was collected. But also, smoking bans (etc) had hugely positive effects on smoking rates. There's every reason to be positive.
Wow looking at your history, please chill. You are very clearly related to the powers at be, i guess you feel unsafe unless uncle sam tucks you in at night. I feel sorry for you at this point...
Same as whenever they talk about banning anything in society… They can’t keep drugs, weapons, phones, etc. out of prisons, which are entirely under government purview. Elect clowns, expect a circus.
Isn't that better? For one, they're connected to peers they have physically met. Additionally, they won't be exposed to strangers or ads that warp their world view.
I still believe that the government should ban unsolicited algorithmic content (so search engines are exempted), but this is a second best option.
If the operators are liable, they will find a way, it's easy for the operators to infer a users age based on usage patterns. They must be required to close these accounts.
It doesn't need to be perfect, but in spite of that perfect is possible if people ask for it. Don't tempt them. Look at what happened in Spain with Cloudflare.
If there was any smart way of doing it, we should block it for everyone. Very little good has come of it. Also solves the age verification problem. It’s soooo difficult to not fall into the addiction trap, and I’m exhausted from keeping myself away from it.
Our governments seem to have just two tools for big issues in society (because they're quick and cheap):
- Nudging, propaganda, posters and automated announcements
- New legislation to ban something
If something can't be fixed with either of those, nothing gets fixed. Shockingly this happens a lot!
Their mates will make some money and lobbyists appeased, then they'll get distracted about what to ban and clutch pearls over next, and the issues our children have will persist and get worse
I like it. We don’t need social media. It is just a convenient way for the elites to collect data and push agendas, and people can communicate in other online ways without limiting themselves to short attention span, doom scrolling and others. TBH I’d be happy that it doesn’t exist.
Quebec has it, too. IMO it should be banned for under-18s instead of under-16s.
Exactly, I stoped using all social media and I feel way better and my screen time went significantly down. It is harder to communicate with some people (have to use email or sms) but it reduced mostly meaningless small talk we can do in person.
If they were really concerned, they'd be doing something about the algorithmic feeds pumping right wing vitreol into everything and Elon constantly begging for race wars to start.
When the OSA came into force I checked the iOS App Store and the top 10 apps in the UK at the time were all dodgy free VPNs. This legislation is utterly idiotic.
I'm sick of this government, they won't be getting my vote in the next GE.
Also, stop your BS about a prison system, its not whats going on globally. You are just buying into the BS that Facebook and company are sending you. Good on you for buying into their propaganda. The world existed before social media and it will keep existing.
OR we can try to move this to the positive side instead of fighting the fascists. We dont NEED social media, its a cancer on humanity. So maybe instead accept this BS and move it towards a place that we can all agree upon. I understand the UK political system is corrupt to its core, like all world goverments, but that's not the reason why to ignore and give in to
what the government is demanding.
There will still be social media. Most of the public conversation will still take place there. You just won't be able to use it anonymously (possibly not even read it).
I teach children. You have no idea how much social media has affected their attention, memory, critical reasoning and social skills: the social repercussions will be felt for decades.
And this isn't mentioning exposing easily malleable minds to propaganda paid for by states that see the UK as an enemy, all before their critical reasoning skills, and awareness of their emotions, and how their emotions can be used against them, have had the chance to develop.
I expect this to massively electorally backfire on the government. But in the long run, it will be more than worth it. The only alternative would be to blanket ban phones in schools, although they'll still be plugged into social media the minute they leave.
Tbh I've never understood why a strict non-negotiable ban on phones in schools hasn't been in place. This is an easy win with no negative consequences for adults.
It already exists in the schools near where I live in the UK, but only came into place in some of them in the last year. I was surprised that they had been so slow about it.
It’s happening in my area, too (US, not UK).
I was also surprised it hadn’t been the case. Apparently there were some policies against phone use during class but the enforcement was so toothless and sporadic that teachers and kids alike were ignoring the rule.
Now the rules are firm, universally applied, and have actual consequences. That last part seems to be the key. You can try to say phones are banned but until there are actual consequences it’s not really going to make a difference.
Round here they have a locked pouch they have to put their phone in during school which seems to work reasonably well (although I'm sure not perfectly). It makes it more clearcut if they do find somebody with a phone not in their pouch anyway that they've definitely broken the rules. They get locked at registration at the start of the day and then unlocked when they leave school at special points.
I too don't like all this "age-verification" approach, but how does banning phones in school prevent kids / teens from using social media?
The goal is to prevent phones and social media from being a distraction during school time.
The schools in my district did it. Several kids ran huge campaigns with flyers and news media involvement trying to protest it, but after that died down the response has been very positive.
It’s not going to satisfy the people who think that all children everywhere must be banned from social media at all times whether their parents agree or disagree. It does have a very positive impact at schools.
Oh ok. I agree with you from that perspective - phone are indeed a distraction and should be banned in school. I do find that whole debate strange though because in India, schools (not government) have never allowed phones in the first place and our society has been largely fine with that practice. Nobody has accused any school of "overreaching" or made such mandates a political issue. In fact, my mischievous nephew's phone was confiscated by his school Principal who told his parents that she wouldn't return it till the term ended because they shouldn't be giving a phone to him at his age!
it was the case when i was younger and phones were still dumb. We've gone backwards
I'm really torn on this. On the one hand I agree with you 100%, whilst on the other I have little faith that our government will implement in a non-damaging way. However, I'd almost be willing to trade some amount of civil-liberty in order to protect us from the rot of social media. If I could ban everyone from "harmful social media" I would, I just understand that's impossible to define and implement without massive unintended externalities.
I'm not naive to how much of a slippery slope that is, and I don't think the government is pursuing this in good faith. Nonetheless, here we are.
> You have no idea how much social media has affected their attention, memory, critical reasoning and social skills: the social repercussions will be felt for decades.
I don't see different results among my peers (I'm 39) let alone older people.
Seeing my family, it's mostly the 50+ that are consistently distracted by phones, not the Gen Zs.
My kid's school bans phones for that very reason. I find the age limit annoying and very easy to circumvent, which renders it pointless. This is a problem, because I agree with the benefits of kids attention not being eroded at scale.
edit: added age
The other potential good outcomes are that (1) make a dent (however minuscule) into current and future revenue of parasitic american companies (2) a next generation of young people growing up not addicted to social media.
The latter has the same effect of trying to proselytise to a grown, intelligent adult. The response is, quite rightly, yuck.
May I ask how long you've been teaching and generally how big the behavioural change and/or timespan has been?
I am fine with banning social media for minors.
What I find utterly wrong is the method, because this way you end up tracking also every adult.
A better way would be to legislate that minors need to use devices specifically designed for them, so that they can be kept under control, and forbid them to use regular devices.
My daughter cannot drive my car, and I don't need to insert my id card to use it, nor there is a facial recognition system to ensure that I am an adult.
Banning the kids from access social media sounds like just an excuse to be able to track adults.
You seem to have contradicted yourself saying it's OK to ban them and then saying it's just an excuse to track adults. But you're no exception it seems everyone involved in this discussion is conflicting these two issues. How about we just say we're going to ban minors - make that the law, and then figure out the proper technical approach? We're smart technologies here and I'm sure in about an hour we could find a solution.
No, I'm not conflicting the two issues. I'm fine with the ban I'm not fine with how it is being implemented, I thought the example would make it clear.
A ban shouldn't affect the adults (and this is the same for stuff like porn). If you think that kids should be restricted from a portion of the Internet, have the tools that they use check who they are... but adults should be able to use other tools.
Then we agree.
I know I'm inherently an optimist, but I assume that society can and will implement it properly. This isn't hard technically but apparently it is hard politically.
That's just a long way to say you hate Pink Floyd
Do you agree that parents should be the one protecting their children from this 'propaganda' and internet slop?
Whilst I agree that social media can be overwhelmingly negative especially for young people, dont you recon that the risk to privacy and free-nature / increased surveillance of the internet is a greater problem?
I’m a parent, children should be banned from social media and enforcement should include serious fines for parents who don’t monitor their children.
After the first 2-3 fines, people will magically learn to use parental control and the idiocy of age verification will end.
I think they should be "one of" not "the one." You know, it takes a village. And in any event, as others have said, parents have completely refused to participate in the question anyways, so in the real world your statement is not worth the paper it's written on.
Not OP but parental controls have existed for over a decade in these platforms with little to no uptake.
Now that the UK has had 3 major riots in the past 24 months exacerbated by foreign social media bots, it is all the more critical to prevent children from falling into the trap.
The time for the carrot is over. It's time for the stick.
On a separate note, I find it funny that plenty of so called internet freedom supporters are using HN given that it's terms and conditions give YC full ownership of comments in perpetuity.
"Parental controls? What parental controls?", a.k.a. "Parental controls are unusable… and it’s why Congress is stepping in." - https://web.archive.org/web/20231115165553/https://gabrielsi... - 113 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38314224
"Parental controls aren't for parents" - https://beasthacker.com/til/parental-controls-arent-for-pare... - 456 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46464652
"Apple’s Parental Controls Are Broken" - https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-parental-controls-are-br... - 43 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36921602
"Apple parental controls have more holes than Swiss cheese" - https://xcancel.com/MichaelErmer_/status/2012515535326527740 - 3 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672071
And as a bonus
"Tell HN: Attackers using Google parental controls to prevent account recovery" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056472
Apply the stick to the companies and people doing this, you don't think social media was critical in the UK riots? See how even adults are affected by the thing you're proposing controlling with age limits.
[dead]
Shouldn't parents be the ones to protect their children from the dangers of heroin, rather than an over-reaching state?
Do you really believe parents can realistically protect their wards from getting hooked to any harmful, addictive drugs? How will they ever know if their kids are experimenting with these drugs? The problem is that the drugs are addictive - all it it needs is for someone to try it a few times to get completely hooked to it. And you don't realise it until it is too late.
IMO everything you said is equally applicable to social media (unless you have complete and total surveillance over your kids)
I was explaining why stopping the circulation of harmful substances, like Heroin, do require government intervention and that parents alone cannot fight it. Your conflation that such drugs are equivalent to addictive social media is something I don't agree with - they are addictive but it's a different type of addiction and the harm is different too (more psychological than physical). That said, I will concede that I mostly agree that "age verification" isn't perhaps the best approach to fight it.
Funny example, because many argue that stopping the war on drugs would solve a lot of problems.
Arguing about whether this is good or effective for kids or not is irrelevant. This isn't about kids at all. It's about surveillance.
Do you not see that the largest companies on the internet are also surveilling everyone and that the massive troves of data they're collecting about their registered users and even non-registered users is directly and indirectly accessible to governments around the world?
Doesn’t that prove their point?
How so? If you're anti-surveillance, wouldn't you be pleased that under-16s won't be able to use the most wide-ranging and insidious surveillance platforms ever created?
Until they turn 17, then they get to be id-verified surveilled like the rest of us!
Much safe system. Very cozy. Glad kids are safe now. That was close!
So what's your solution?
There's substantial evidence for harms on young people that go beyond surveillance, but I guess we now live in a society that embraces throw them to the wolves and see which ones survive?
The only proper solution always used for children. Parent's discretion.
Other people's kids are not my nor the governments business.
I will restrict social media as I see fit for my children. Don't need a nanny state.
No need for "think of the children". You shouldn't be thinking of my children, they are fine. Worry about yourself and your own kids.
> The only proper solution always used for children. Parent's discretion.
Cigarettes. Alcohol. Gambling. Weapons. Credit cards and financial products. Solvents/aerosols. Fireworks.
There are tons of products and services that are subject to regulation for children because society has concluded (wisely in most cases) that it is not always possible or effective to rely on parental discretion to prevent harm.
> You shouldn't be thinking of my children, they are fine.
Extreme individualism is in my opinion one of Western society's biggest sore spots right now but I'd like to point out one very practical issue with this approach as it relates to social media.
I can keep my kids off of social media, but social media can still harm them. Your kids can take photos and videos of my kids and post them online without anyone's consent, and use social media to bully my kids.
There is a growing body of evidence about the harms of social media on children's' mental health, particularly as it relates to bullying, and plenty of cases of suicides caused by it.
But I suppose there are other possible solutions. We could enact laws that levy more significant civil and perhaps even criminal penalties on parents whose children use social media to harass and bully. Right now, when parents are found liable for damage caused by their children, civil penalties are usually pretty modest.
If your children, who you say are fine, do something to make my children not fine, you should be willing to take full responsibility for that, right?
Just teach your children to not care what's on social media.
It's a mental attitude. We used to be stronger. Teach that.
People will be assholes, social media or not. Toughen up.
And yeah we ban sold products, not like that does anything though.
Kids will still drink, do drugs, and smoke if they want to. It's not like they won't have siblings of friends that are 18+.
It still comes down to parenting to prevent them from going down that slope.
People being weak and thin skinned is the sore spot in America, not individualism, that's a strength.
> Just teach your children to not care what's on social media.
> It's a mental attitude. We used to be stronger. Teach that.
> People being weak and thin skinned is the sore spot in America, not individualism, that's a strength.
I hope while you're molding your children into strong, thick-skinned individuals who are impervious to everything that happens around them, you remind them that respect, kindness and compassion are virtues too.
Of course, that is the other side of the coin.
Golden rule, put yourself in their shoes, all of that.
I hope you guys are raising your kids to be strong but caring individuals. You need both.
Regardless of the underlying motives and surveillance outcomes, it will surely affect the kids too. So it's worth discussing.
No one is saying we should not discuss it, but discussing it in the context of the kids is a red herring. It will affect everyone.
100%, anti-privacy and surveillance laws have always been wrapped in child protection and public safety.
And yet the vast majority of parents are in favour of a ban.
vast majority of parents are in favor of banning plenty of things, including some that you like, need, or simply don't find objectable.
This is obviously about kids. The problem is it requires surveillance. You don't get to decide what it's not about.
How is it “obviously about the kids”? Is it because they mentioned them? I would argue it will impact the kids but this isn’t being done for their benefit, it’s being done to regulate what we have access to as a whole. Slippery slope coming up!
It will apply to everyone once you have to prove you are over 16. Kids are just the excuse.
The way this has been pushed through after countless attempts over the past decade, and push back from advising experts, does not feel like it originates from genuine concern for children. It feels like a state trying to wrestle for digital control amidst rising civil unrest.
Almost anything can be made "about the kids" with the right framing.
Riddle me this. If you have to verify yourself to prove you are over 16, did that just deanonymize you? Yes.
Good job I said this, then:
> The problem is it requires surveillance.
So it's not "obviously about kids" then.
This is like saying "people using cars to get places is really about oil".
if it was about kids they would have mandated parental controls.
not universal account verification.
people are stupid now though, so I guess they took their shot.
How can the system tell if someone's a parent or not.
The system can't. That's the beauty of it.
It's up for the parents to enable it for their kids.
Just mandate that certain parental features are AVAIALABLE to parents.
It's up to the parents to parent their kids. Not the government. But if you want to mandate something, mandate tools for the parents.
But how does the system know that someone's a parent who should be able to access the parental features?
It doesn't need to.
Parents know who they are. THEY force their kids to use a child account with their parental account linked.
The same way every other parental control system works, whether it's Youtube, Netflix, iOS, Xbox, etc.
and why do you get to decide what it "is about"?
I didn't say people couldn't decide what it's about.
I know many people dislike this movement but really, I think it's a good idea. Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, but that's gone already anyway. Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
I see both children and adults being manipulated by corporations with "algorithms". Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
> but really, I think it's a good idea.
> Yes, it removes the "free" internet
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access
Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state. Now the top voted comment (at least at time of me responding) is an open-arms welcoming of the internet police state and voicing support for removal of the free internet?
How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them? That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too? It's right there in the article. Think about how this has to be enforced: The only way to guarantee under-16s are banned from these sites is to force everyone to produce ID. You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them.
Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.
The slippery slope arguments do nothing. People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
We're bringing it up because it's not being mentioned and we think it's important.
I that once freedom of speech and freedom to communicate and freedom to decent are gone they are gone for good.
I dislike very much that politicians like Peter Kyle and Jess Philips have tried to shut down dissenting voices by comparing them to paedophiles or saying this is just about access to porn.
I'm really angry about this. I don't want to live in a "nanny state" and will probably end up voting for a party I otherwise dislike just get this crap repealed.
Labour, Tories and Greens don't seem to care about personal freedom. I do and I'm fed having politicians and journalists that don't listen to me.
to be clear (and this is kinda addressed at everyone in this thread because it was bothering me a few days later): I don't disagree with any of what you said here. I don't even live in the UK anyway, and I'm inclined to believe the whole plan is idiotic.
What I'm frustrated about is people's inability to have an actual discussion it because they're so affected by emotion (like I said: "people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles"). One can reason about the tradeoffs rationally, instead of by intentionally misunderstanding anyone who disagrees with you and casting them in the most negative possible light, accusing them of wanting police states etc --- and then come to the same conclusions! nothing about using reasoning prohibits the same conclusions --- but because you now engage justly with other people, there's a chance of actually changing their minds.
I am very disappointed in the caliber of replies in this thread. This kind of thing: "Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?" is idiotic. The people they're replying to aren't pro-police state, they're anti-'social media for kids'. They would welcome better solutions to the same issue. but as soon as an angry person misattributes the other sides' opinions to philosophies they didn't espouse and would actively disagree with, all attempt at dialogue---even the kind where you chance someone's mind to agree with you---is fucked.
>We're bringing it up because it's not being mentioned
Huh? I must've read thousands of comments on this site over the years to the effect that any censorship of the internet would be wrong.
Yes, on this site but not in mainstream discussions.
I've lost count of the number of politicians and special interests I've heard on shows like Radio Four's Today Programme talk about online "safety" and funnily enough they never speak about mitigating the fall out from that.
Well mainstream discussions are idiotic, lol. You won't find any deep or principled philosophy there.
What’s idiotic is making all UK adults present ID to foreign controlled websites without any public debate around it.
Destroying freedom isn't a fucking compromise. If algorithmic feeds are as bad as say, heroin, then the correct response is to regulate or ban them. You're arguing for the Internet version of legalising heroin and installing a physical surveillance state to target the addicts, it's absolute fucking insanity.
We... are... talking about regulating and banning them. That is what is being done. Talking about regulating and banning them. Not
> Internet version of legalising heroin and installing a physical surveillance state to target the addicts
Whatever this is. We would be in agreement that would be bad. The debate is over whether this is that, rather than whether that is bad. Misunderstanding that makes all the discussion pointless.
The UK is talking about regulating and banning their consumption.
The UK does not have that ability to regulate and ban their production. The US regards such attempts as illegal foreign censorship.
Ban the sale or use of personalized information for marketing or advertising purposes.
Force the companies to develop effective parental controls (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48530053 for links to how the current controls are not effective.)
Once those all decisively fail then we can perhaps talk about "welcoming of the internet police state and voicing support for removal of the free internet".
> Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.
False. The whole point of fundamental rights is that they aren’t compromised on based on outcomes.
“Torture is bad, but not being able to get information out of criminals is also bad. Some compromise must be made.” That’s just not how it works, is it?
Perhaps it may surprise you to know that's exactly how it works in some democratic countries - e.g. India and Japan - as the system does provide some leeway to the police on how they extract information from suspects. (India leans towards physical torture, while Japan to psychological torture). Moreover, Americans are often surprised to know that not answering police questions can in fact harm your defence in court in many countries, and police misconduct also does not necessarily exclude any evidence collected.
But where exactly is the line for torture? Is pre-trial or pre-charge detention torture? Solitary detention? Any forced labor at all?
> The whole point of fundamental rights is that they aren’t compromised on based on outcomes.
This is false, we generally take away fundamental rights when there's justification for doing so. e.g. the first paragraph of https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47986 (and every other paragraph also; I'm sure there are UK equivalents). We enshrine fundamental rights in order to elevate them above baser considerations, but it's not like a paperclip-maximizer thing where we optimize 100% for protecting them over all other considerations. Nor should it be (for the obvious paperclip-maximizer failure modes).
Anyway, the debate here is not over "police state good" and I'm frankly disappointed in all the commenters who interpret anyone disagreeing with them as claiming that. I for example loathe the idea of a police state and I'm quite sure the people I'm replying to would find I agree with them on most issues related to that. But it is not black and white, despite everyone's attempts at portraying it as such. I would love to hear people's practical, viable, politically-tenable plans for doing something about industrial-scale addiction to social media which do not involve impinging on these freedoms at all.
It's interesting that we suddenly can't regulate anything because of "freedom" and "speech" and it just happens to align perfectly with big tech interests.
The whole freedom and speech shit online is starting to feel like a big lie we have been sold so that big tech can just get richer.
Assigning infinite weight to one factor or consideration is sort of the definition of fanaticism, yes?
The monopoly on violence is trying to solve this problem, that's a bigger problem.
> I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them.
I couldn't tell if this post was satire at first read.First it complains about not weighting tradeoffs, then it follows up with a demand that we ignore the tradeoffs as noise and just push through with the regulations.
You see the irony, right? You're stunned that people can't weigh tradeoffs, then you switch to dismissing tradeoffs as noise:
> People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
Considering the second order and higher order consequences of regulations is the entire point.
You're just waving them all away with an assumption that they will be solved in the future.
Trying to shut down discussion about the consequences of government action as noise is scary. We've reached levels of moral panic that people like you are happy to close your eyes to any consequences and insist we let the government take control and do whatever they want right now, without considering the consequences.
It's terrifying that people think this way.
It's not satire.
> people like you are happy to close your eyes to any consequences and insist we let the government take control and do whatever they want right now, without considering the consequences.
Nobody said anything of the sort. That's the problem with trying to debate this: you're interpolating this stance into people who don't have it at all.
Hey, if it's irrelevant noise then why are you crying about it?
Anyway, to make it the UK's problem even more, I will be doing what I can to eliminate the UK's traffic to as many services as possible. I have no interest in supporting the small island or it's people or their great red coat firewall.
Enjoy your wall.
Over time it's become harder and harder to deny how bad some aspects of the internet are for people, especially for young people. Whether it's right or wrong it's not shocking that people are more willing than ever to entertain the idea of internet restrictions.
I'd dig deeper on the problem though. More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.
Yet we have laws around child endangerment. I'm a big supporter of parental sovereignty, but I also acknowledge that if society operates the way it does, I can't immediately think of a good reason why "mental health endangerment" (which social media for kids very much is) wouldn't be included in the broader scope of endangerment.
I don't have children so huge caveat there, but from what I have heard from those parents I'm close to our child endangerment laws are out of hand.
I had a family member find police knocking on their door because their child was playing unattended in the front lawn in the middle of the day in a nice neighborhood with very low crime. While I completely get that some people find that unsafe and wouldn't let their kids play outside unsupervised, it wasn't long ago that I was a kid riding my bike a mile or two down the road to go to a friend's house on the other end of our neighborhood.
Either we all now live in a crime riddled third world country (aging myself there, I guess its the global south now), or we may have overstepped in the name of keeping other people's children safe despite what their parents think is best.
With regards to social media, that should be something we are making loud and clear to parents so they can make the decision best for them. A close friend didn't let their kids have a cell phone or be on social media at all until 16 years old, parent can absolutely make similar choices if they think it matters.
Creativity requires limitations.
> More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.
Also yeah? Sure? You may not like that that’s the conclusion. Why does everyone say this like it’s some kind of gotcha? Children are incapable biologically of making good decisions.
But yes, I cannot make these decisions of myself and want the state to step in. It’s way too big a surface area.
I don't say it as a gotcha. I say it to make clear that its an assumption baked into these laws that (a) I'm not sure a strong majority of people agree with and (b) creates further precedent for more government control over our lives and our children.
Edit: why is it you know these decisions should be made but you can't do it yourself? Do you not trust yourself, like an alcoholic avoiding one drink because it turns into 12, or do you not think you're capable of making the right choice at all?
OG internet was not swarming with multibillion dollar predators ready to exploit every single psychological trick to manipulate you for profit. If you can solve this, i welcome the OG internet to be free and open place to share ideas. Let me know your suggestions.
The mistake is thinking that regulation and removing the free internet is going to harm those corporations you dislike and leave the smaller sites untouched.
The more regulations are added, the harder it is for anyone other than the multibillion dollar corporations to set up the infrastructure needed to comply.
That small forum you visit and the chat space you hang out in have to geo block your entire region because their operator can’t take on the legal risk of accidentally violating one of the laws. You are, however, free to move the group to Facebook and continue your group chat on Discord after submitting to the ID verification process of both sites, however. Those are the sanctioned safe spaces that have teams of lawyers and developers ensuring compliance with the laws.
This is the future many here are inviting. They don’t see it that way because they’re imagining laws that say “Kids can’t use Facebook” but the actual laws are going to be written to say “Social sites that host user generated content must ensure that all users are over the age of…”
If a big player in a space is asking for regulation, always treat it as them pulling the ladder up to make things harder for new upstarts.
As an example, look at what Anthropic's response to the US making them pull Fable. They commended the action and said they believe there need to be permanent regulations around safety of released models with approval committees and mandatory testing.
They aren't recommending it purely because of safety, they want to add expenses to their competitors without so much money to burn.
And not just that, these networks are becoming a conduit for all kind of disturbed people to invade the privacy of kids and pollute their world, sometimes convincing them to harm themselves, including suicide. Let's face it, as the internet has become more and more accessible to just about anybody, needing to police the space was bound to become inevitable.
Because it’s a lesser evil, at least in the UK, which has a reasonably well functioning government and society.
As much as it pains me, I’d rather have that than the brain rot being forced on young kids. And you can argue all you want about “parental control”, but there are too many parents who don’t care, plus peer pressure is a real thing.
I also think that at that age all the social media sites are a net negative.
> Because it’s a lesser evil, at least in the UK, which has a reasonably well functioning government and society.
You wrote this in jest, right, right?
We do, objectively speaking. We have free elections, viable new political parties, working mechanisms of feedback from the population to politicians, and a constitution keeping up with the times (we had a constitutional change just this year).
It doesn't surprise me at all. At least in the US, both major political parties fully embrace censorship and a police state. Sure the disagree on the details, but they agree pretty universally on the direction.
I believe this is the outcome of technocracy. Technocrats need power, they need a strong police to enforce their legislation, and they need censorship to maintain a narrative. It's a deeply authoritarian ideology, and it's infected much of the western world.
Yeah that's a very reasonable hypothesis. More generally, I assume it happens anytime power is centralized into too few hands - they will always want force to keep what they have.
Let's look at an actual case study of a police state.
I think we can agree that a state-controlled paramilitary force executing a political opponent in broad daylight, on camera, is pretty far along the "police state" spectrum, right? This kind of thing is entirely incompatible with freedom, and should be a wake up call for the civil society to weed out anything that led to that, root and branch.
Enter the execution of Alex Pretti. Days after it happened, it transformed into yet another partisan issue, a topic for discussion, something that can possibly be justified. Effectively, it was normalised on the social and classic media. Media that, in the US, are pretty "free" [].
Negative freedoms are insufficient to stop a police state. What stops the police state is political engagement and regulation, and that requires a more nuanced understanding than just "either free of regulation or embracing the police state".
: …for moneyed interests to control and influence. For all their problems, I'd argue that BBC is substantially freer than say Fox News.
Why do you think we lost free internet right now? In my opinion we lost it when all corporations switched to mass surveilance. Now we just stop pretending that social media corporations are not responsible for anything.
>Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
There is certainly an angle where people are fed up with the current state of things.
But generally speaking, the overall HN has been trending towards anti-free-internet and embracing the police state for a long time. I am pretty sure people can run an LLM on HN comments over the years.
The optimism has faded after a decade of tech leaders all turning out to be unbelievably evil.
I don't think it has to do with optimism has faded. Eternal September means Younger generation new to HN, It is highly likely if we were to do a poll, people under 40, lower age group would increasingly support Anti-Free Internet. This mentality also aligns well with majority of their political believe.
> Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
I suspect it's because people of our generation (I'm assuming) grew up with similar experiences to ours and had kids, and want to protect them. To be fair it's worse now than when we were growing up; I can't imagine how awful it must be to grow up in the age of social media.
Because we've been conditioned to believe that every good thing harbors a dark and sinister secret, that every attempt at improving our situation contains a fatal flaw.
It's a narrative trope, not real life. Come back to reality. It's what Omelas was trying to convey.
The internet as it is sucks in no uncertain terms.
While I dislike some of those regulations, I have no will to fight for the status quo.
> Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too?
Consider that I have a profound hatred for both YouTube and Reddit.
Why should I care?
There are very likely people who's work is to shill... Also here... If not influencing editors of entire sites even. But they are only needed until it becomes full though crime to even think outside of newspeak ;)
> Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit
Reddit is a cesspool and an example of how we're in a post-peak internet like the OP says. If you actually browse Reddit the way the vast majority of people do now (i.e. not Old Reddit that masks the decline), it's crazy engagement-farming patterns everywhere, and not much of a community any more when many comments are hidden by default.
Most people today just like to fire off one-sentence comments; if you seek substantial discussion, you'll often now stand out as a weirdo on the spectrum, and may even draw downvotes and "lol wall of text bro" comments.
Yes, I follow close-knit little subs off the main page. There has been a flow of users away to WhatsApp groups, of all things -- it's that bad.
“Suddenly”? Remember all the “net neutrality” bullshit years ago that was all about begging the government to regulate the Internet? This has been going on since the early 00s probably. If you’re old enough to remember the 90s and earlier Internet then yes, it’s a strange thing to see, but that ship has sailed, circumnavigated the globe, and been decommissioned.
Why shocked? When the internet got popular and the normies started flooding in the culture of the internet changed.
I’m more shocked in how authoritarian so-called “liberals” have gotten in the last 3 decades. I have to specify I’m a “classical” liberal now in order to not appear as if I desire a police state.
The posters account is 89 days old, it's a shill.
> You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
No, I want more. I want us to not be able to use these sites at all.
The modern internet has become a cesspool. There’s some good stuff here and there but it’s not worth the overly negative downsides. Reddit is mostly bots. YouTube is becoming clickbait slop. Social Media platforms are ruining society.
We need an alternative to the internet. Not long ago, we did not have all these things and it was one of the best times to be alive.
I feel like you only picked the parts from my comment you cited and then decided to ignore the rest. I specifically explained WHY I am in favor of those aspects you question.
Yes, it is what I want. Would it be, in an ideal world? No. But we don't live in that world, we live in reality. You only focus on the positive aspects of the internet and frame it that way. Try this one instead:
Do you not realize that you are being brainwashed by billionaires? Companies abuse your mind, track your behavior, collect your data, all to exploit you. They want to you to become addicted, to waste your entire life consuming their content, to become antisocial and alone.
This is our current reality. So, yes, if the cost is that the goverment knows who I am while browsing to remove all of that from our lives again, it would be what I want.
As an engineer, I tend to view solutions in terms of tradeoffs and not absolutes. 20 years ago the free and open internet was great. Now I think we’ve gone too far. And more to the point, I think freedom is protected by regulation, not by handing decisions over to whatever billionaire won a cage match.
This is the gen-x part of my xennial talking, but I can’t help but feel like something has been lost when nothing is transgressive anymore. Some people look back and say how can a gen x’er who fought against censorship be so pro censorship now.
A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do. I think there’s a sort of weird like - there’s something distopian about Elon Musk putting his stamp of approval on using edgy racial slurs on social media. If you’re young and want to make edgy jokes. It’s supposed to be transgressive! It’s _not_ supposed to get Elon Musk’s stamp of approval.
I don’t want to send anyone to jail for bypassing these laws or saying the wrong thing. It’s a hard needle to thread, but we need a code of conduct so people can make a choice to break it. So people can create alternate websites to the big social media companies. We need institutions without so much power so they can be jailbroken. And government is just plainly not the only powerful institution I fear.
> A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do.
So the teenagers bypass it and use other sites while us adults are handing our IDs over just to use basic websites?
How is this good?
I’m becoming something of an accelerationist on this issue. I think we’re at a dead end with like 5 companies controlling most of the internet. If this pisses people off and encourages them to get active politically or create new modes of communication. Great!
Freedom has to be more than “you can choose any walled garden you want!” We need more spaces that aren’t mediated.
I feel like we’ve accepted this terrible definition of freedom, out of fear it could get worse, not because we love what we have.
But not to worry, I feel comfortable having contrarian views, because my one vote isn’t going to radically change the world.
You're basing everything on a flawed assumption: That the regulations will be most difficult for the big websites, but not be an impediment to small communities.
It never works that way. The more regulations you add, the harder it becomes to have a small community on the internet. The big companies can spend money to comply and lobby. The small communities cannot.
We are already seeing this. There are websites blocking the UK because they can't afford to comply with all of their laws. Even websites that try to block the UK are getting threats from Ofcom for not ID-checking their users: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1rk690v/i_ru...
The end game of your accelerationism isn't a utopia where we're all back to small communities.
The end game is that small communities die out because the only companies who can navigate, comply, and lobby are those 5 companies you hated. You're cheering on the consolidation of the internet.
There’s a reasons I described it as accelerationism. I think whatever the next thing is probably hasn’t been invented yet, but I would hope the discomfort of exclusion might inspire it. It only works if enough people feel left out - I.e. all under 16s
But yeah, it’s not without risks.
But there’s two sort of self-identified reasons for freedom of speech.
One is to get the best ideas on the table. I’m a little suss of this one (when taken to extremes) because speech that costs nothing is just noise.
The second is to make sure everyone has an outlet to express themselves so they don’t rebel. And while I certainly don’t want to see violent rebellion, I think maybe a bit more social and political rebellion wouldn’t be the end of the world.
The typical medium for the internet today, even among many people who would have been computer nerds in days of yore, is the smartphone, i.e. primarily a consumption device. I can't see people becoming so pissed out that they would overcome the limitations of the phone and actually create bold new modes of communication. Just using an alternative prepackaged app like Signal is way out there for most people.
Despite propaganda to the contratry, meatspace is still an option.
> The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state.
I grew up on that internet too (the freedom part). Do you really believe it is the same internet now?
Gone are the days when one could run their own mail server now because Apple or Google or Microsoft can suddenly deem it as "untrustworthy" or "suspicious" (based on some algorithm) and all your email will end up in spam. IRC and newsgroups have been hijacked by centralised Messengers and Social Media firms run by BigTech. They can ban you on these platforms for no reasons, without much recourse, holding your digital life hostage. Last year, I learnt that the much vaunted "free speech" no longer exists online - I have to fight and waste time with everyone - from the moderators to the platform "community managers" - to publish any factual pro-palestine or anti-Israli-right posts because these are being heavily censored on all western platforms (and unfortunately all English language communities are western platforms). Election manipulations by foreign platforms are also another danger every sovereign nations now faces.
> How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them?
So I wouldn't say that people are being "naive". We don't want to live in an "echo chamber" controlled by western or Chinese BigTech corporates and their ideas of techno-fascism. Not to mention that we really cannot ignore any more the societal and political impact of some of these platforms - Facebook / Whatsapp are responsible for causing many social unrest around the world and even genocide (How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... ).
The negative psychological impact of social media addiction is so obvious even in adults. So imagine how much worse it is on kids / teens - it truly would be irresponsible to not regulate it.
> That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Oh, very true! That is something to be very wary of. And the answer to that is to also fight for stronger privacy regulations and prevent government overreach. Not trust the government or the corporates to behave.
Here, you will have to understand and accept that unlike in America, where mistrust of government is inherent in the political structure (the US Presidential system favoured a weak central government because the makers were distrustful of a powerful Federal government) is very much in contrast to other parts of the world. Europeans expect and have more trust in their governments to regulate some aspects of their society, while the rest of the world prefers a "strong" Central government (and thus it is expected that the government will regulate many aspects of society). That is something fundamentally different vis American politics vs the rest of the world, that perhaps befuddles Americans.
In a democracy though, I don't see anything wrong in "trusting" your government more than local or foreign corporates (or even a foreign country - for all the talk about how America stood for "free speech", my experience with American / western owned platforms censoring my political ideas and beliefs has made me increasingly cynical if they ever truly believe in democratic values; so yeah - I guess you could also say that all this is also perhaps a backlash to current western politics).
> Gone are the days when one could run their own mail server now because Apple or Google or Microsoft can suddenly deem it as "untrustworthy" or "suspicious" (based on some algorithm) and all your email will end up in spam.
Someone should tell my mail server that because it happily delivers emails to Apple and Google and Microsoft destinations.
(I will concede that it is much more of a ballache these days than it was 25 years ago but such is the way when capitalism intrudes with adequate legal oversight.)
Yes, I should have added it is harder now because it now requires "constant vigilance" - receiving mail is easy and fine and dandy, it's the delivery part that has now become a real pain because of the BigTech gatekeepers. It's the same with social media communities too.
it takes very little effort from those who control the media to turn terminally online cattle for/against anything, because they are almost completely uncritical of their side of the establishment. pander to them 95% of the time, and you can use the remaining 5% to push whatever agenda you like.
among the least controversial things I can give as an example without getting silently downvoted and flagged, would you have ever imagined that particular demographic demanding draconian copyright laws? yet, here we are, copyright is good now.
I disagree. I don’t have a huge problem with the UK government monitoring my online presence; I’m reasonably sure my ISP is siphoning all that information to them anyway. That may be problematic for some, but I’m ok with it.
My problem is that this info doesn’t go to the government; it goes to persona and Yoti. We are literally giving government issued IDs to tracking platforms to tell Meta, Google, ByteDance, Reddit who we are.
This isn’t about keeping children safe - if it was the law would be to mandate parental controls on devices. I’d stand behind that law.,
> as drugs
Because war on drugs has been such a successful policy...?
I have no idea how successful the US war on drugs has been and I don't need to, because I am not from the US and the US is not everything there is in the world. Just because one attempt to fight something bad failed, that doesn't mean every attempt ever at fighting anything bad is doomed to fail.
As a means of reducing incidence of drug use, prohibition does in fact work.
I'm not saying the war on drugs has been successful by any means.
But legalization has also been a really disappointing flop. After marijuana was legalized in my state, it has been really disturbing to see usage skyrocket among middle and high schoolers. A lot of people apparently derive their standards of morality from the legal system.
Nor arguing and I do appreciate your perspective but that’s so odd: vodka is legal and middle and high schoolers shouldn’t be getting into that either.
Yeah if they legalised cannabis use for teenagers that's a failure of how it was regulated - not of the act of legalising it.
Has actual use increased or is it now just more visible to you?
>Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, but that's gone already anyway.
The "free" internet is there, just the same as before. The proportion of people using it in the way they used to might have changed.
>Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
The issue is once the mechanism is in place, the government will surely use that mechanism when it's convenient. You need look no further than the Online Safety Act of 2023, which was sold as a way to protect children but didn't even go a whole week before the government was censoring videos for political reasons.
The end of internet anonymity is a one-way door. Once we're through there will be no going back.
Keeping children off social media, or to a very limited children only social media seems obviously a good thing.
My issue is the UK “free” speech standards seem to be something like free speech as long as its reasonable, doesn’t offend or excite too many people, cast aspersions on those in power etc, in other words not very free at all. And any form of internet registration could be used to tie more people to their posts.
Of course restricting posting some benefit exists as we seen in the US with robust free speech and twitter being overrun with third world posters attempting to influence domestic politics.
Isn’t it already impossible to be anonymous on the internet without flawless opsec? I’m surprised there isn’t a TV Tropes article about it but whenever a character in a show needs to be perfectly anonymous they visit an Internet cafe with a baseball cap and glasses - which while it’s a trope I think it also plays on our cultural understanding that significant diligence is required to maintain anonymity.
Edit: though I suppose the counterargument is that we shouldn’t make it any easier for surveillance states, especially technologically inept ones, to perform dragnet surveillance.
There’s a middle ground between going to cybercafes with sunglasses, and submitting a 4K scan of you gov ID before watching a YouTube video where someone says a bad word.
I'm generally in agreement on social media bans for children, but the proposed solution is age verification on all platforms which has a huge amount of problems.
Why can't we just ban the use of smartphones without parental locks for under 16-year-olds instead? That's not perfect but would already be a huge improvement and adults wouldn't be affected by it.
"Yes, it will lead to mass surveillance but who cares anyway? You can't just argue against that, that's anarchism!"
Do you know how you sound? Stop falling for these tactics, no one is caring for the children while making these laws.
Yes, I sound like someone who cares about our well-being as humans, and I am happy about that.
Do you know how you sound yourself? A conspiracist. If indeed everyone is out to get us and wants to control our brains, then that's f'd up. But you have just as little knowledge about whether that is true as I do.
Thanks for destroying our free society, I appreciate it.
A better measure would be to mandate that social media platforms can only show you content from people you follow, and in chronological order.
That basically kills the business model and would wipe hundreds of billions of $ in capital away
Not that I disagree
Good!
I like this idea, to me the algorithm the most offending part.
But how do you control what a kid can or cannot follow? They can still follow Andrew Tate and his temu versions
At some point you have to allow people to see what they want to see. You don't have to make it so that what they want to see is pushed on them, though, and this is what modern social media does. It pushes stuff just because it's engaging.
This is not about the good of the people. And the sooner you realize that this type of regulation will be used to manipulate you as much as what you fear is happening already the better.
The government is an entity that acts to protect itself. It has and always will fear an open and informed public.
majority of parents are in favour of such a ban, otherwise they wouldn't do it
if social media companies hadn't made social media a total cesspit of disinformation, child grooming and algorithmic manipulation then the outcome might have been different
> it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago
I’m not sure free internet was ever good for us. I didn’t need to see all those beheading videos.
I think the bigger issue was when terror attacks started imitating FPS games
That is pretty much my point. I just wanted to point that out because, next to being controlled by the government, it's the most common argument against stuff like this I see.
> Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago,
social media is not, and never was the "free internet" we all get nostalgic about. maybe the first couple of years was something tangential, but that died very quickly. since then it's been a nightmare-ish hellscape of surveillance, manipulation and hate.
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
anyone claiming something like that is happening here is just spreading paranoiac FUD via a cheap and lazy straw man. if UK law starts requiring me to provide ID just to read rust crate documentation or connect to the internet then that is an issue. i would be very unhappy about it. but that is not happening here.
let's not be drama queens about it.
> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
i've asserted for a very long bloody time that major social media platforms, not the internet in general, should require government ID verification of some sort to have an account. would likely make it far easier for the police to prosecute a lot of the nasty shit that only happens on those platforms.
having said that, these platforms are designed to prioritise engagement and angry, toxic and hate-filled people click more. so it's the platform's fault but as ever they're not cleaning up their mess.
if folks on HN wanna blame someone or get angry then get angry at the platforms for letting it get to where we are today. it's their own fucking faults.
The post was edited?!
It's a good idea, as long as this clown show of a government doesn't link it to mandatory digital IDs.
Any reason to think they won't?
Right. A lot of "Internet Freedom" is just dishonest Anarchism. A thought terminating cliche that halts otherwise brilliant people from actually considering the tradeoffs of policies like this.
The whole appeal of Anarchy is that The State always has the potential to become Evil. So, at a (very quick) first pass - eliminating The State kinda seems like it heads off some bad futures.
While some of the HN commentariat may be anarchists, you and I at least are not.
I want you to imagine the sentiment here if it was "Russia set to announce social media ban for under-16s".
I would think to myself "I hope we do the same as well soon."
If the goal is to take away mental manipulation from children, them I am all for it, no matter who does it.
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You can't attack others like this here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
We ban accounts that do, so please don't do it again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Strong worded comment but yes, it's exhausting seeing people here of all places arguint against their own rights and the freedom of the internet :/ I guess the fight is already lost. Remember when people literally went to the streets while fighting SOPA, PIPA and ACTA?
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Assertions of correctness and unreasonableness are useless. Positions without supporting arguments are noise.
Sorry to break it out to you, but the internet was already destroyed by people like you in silicon valley, not the government
Why do you think I'm like the people destroying the Internet? Because I said a bad word? Are you actually retarded? I'd love to return to the Internet we had in the 90s and 2000s, we're not going to get there if defeatist bitches like you cave and let the governments of the world control who is allowed to serve http responses to people that don't put their government ID in the header and route it through a 3rd party.
No, because the people who ruined the Internet were people like you who grew up on it, and then continued on to monetize it. The government was always too slow to be an actual threat.
Also chill with the anger
> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
Adopting the drug prohibition model is fine, if what we want is to lavishly enrich the social media cartels, and visit upon the rest of the world needless crime, misery, addiction, and death.
Obviously OP is not
Somehow all the countries are suddenly proposing the same thing. You'd think at least one of these countries might try something different if they actually cared about the kids, like banning algorithmic feeds. Not suspicious at all.
I don’t think it’s suspicious - I think trust globally in tech companies has been deteriorating at the same pace in most western countries is all.
But so has trust in government (for very good reasons). And those same unscrupulous governments are heavily influenced by the very same tech companies people are suspicious of.
Then why not regulate some other aspect of those companies? Surely the harms extend beyond children?
This is not about tech companies, they will shrug it off. It’s about containing protest and suppressing public speech.
Not beyond the realms of possibility that Meta etc has decided it wants government/photo ID and has convinced governments to implement it
Big tech will act inconvenienced but they will in reality benefit
Just like any attempt by a UK Gov to fix housing: they just make it worse, because that was the real aim (yes I include the latest renter's rights legislation)
World leaders pay attention to the world. Australia implemented the law and it went smoothly. So naturally other world leaders are going to see that as a green light that the general public is on board and the tech companies complied.
I'm probably going down a conspiracy theory, but it's notable when all the Five Eyes countries seem to start talking about the same problem and pushing through legislation. The US would probably do the same if not for the constitution.
Not sure how closely you follow US news, but a majority of Americans feel that the current US administration is not all that concerned with the constitution, so that not really a blocker.
I think there's some sort of 'social pressure' between nations. Policies during the COVID-19 era come to mind.
It's called lobbying.
And yet you're still labeled a conspiracy theorist if you suggest that their might be ulterior motives for identity verification in the nation that arrested 12,000 people for what they posted online in 2023.
I'm actually very supportive of getting rid of screens + social media for kids. I don't the reasons I'm supportive of that bear any resemblance to the motives of the UK's political class.
Everyone started using Claude for coding at the same time, something is suspicious!
Interesting that Canada is trying to do the same thing. Seems suspiciously similar.
The idea that this is about surveillance is also interesting.
I think it's important we ask: could we invoke this ban without surveillance?
- identity scan is one solution
But surely there are other solutions? Can't you just make laws that get kids in trouble if they get caught on social media? Kids get in trouble for missing school.. there are other incentives than identify checks, surely?
The solution is parental controls on devices.
Surely we know by now that this is not enough?
Kids find ways around everything. Even adults find the 'digital wellbeing' tools on Android and iOS useless. Just look at the multitude of apps available for digital self regulation these days (ScreenZen, Freedom, BlockSite, etc). No single solution works for everybody at the moment.
Regulation by itself is also insufficient. But maybe combining regulation with parental controls plus other measures will be effective. A 'defense in depth' or swiss cheese strategy, with multiple layers of protection.
I do hope we figure out what layers are needed soon, though. It feels like we're running out of time.
Regulation does add friction. And it makes it easier for a parent to say 'no, you aren't allowed that app' (which you can obviously say anyway, but it gives you a very solid and non-negotiable reason to say no). Some children will find their ways round things, but a lot, if their friends aren't using a particular app, won't bother, or they will be the type of children who won't try and break the law.
Most apps and sites are terrible in terms of the parental controls they provide - they tend to be all or nothing. E.g. I'd like to have a group for our family on WhatsApp but I don't want my children to be able to join random WhatsApp groups and there isn't any way to have the former and not the latter.
https://blog.whatsapp.com/introducing-parent-managed-account...
It’s very recent but WhatsApp are giving you exactly what you want!
I think the idea is that while individuals will absolutely find ways round it, it should help to reduce the network effect of everyone a kid knows being already on it. How true that is remains to be seen.
One campaign I’ve liked is one in the UK to try and get the parents of whole year groups in school to agree to not buy phones until their children are a certain age. This removes a lot of the peer pressure of ‘my friends all have one’.
Except they are. I’m not aware of any actual bypasses of parental controls on iOS or android. You choose apps and allow or deny them, and you provide limits which are guarded by passcodes or parental prompt (on iOS at least).
> It feels like we're running out of time.
I mean, does it? It feels like we’re running guns blazing into something that will be trivially bypassable (hello free VPN to some random European country - remember Hola?).
The solution is parenting, period. Do not give your kid an Internet-connected device before they are ready for it.
Homework requires internet-connected devices (I guess you can semi-supervise that, but it becomes harder as they become older as you don't want to sit there watching them do all their homework).
There is also a cost socially, which is hard to navigate as a parent. If everybody is talking about minecraft every break and playing it together in the evenings, then it's hard for them if they haven't even seen the game.
>Homework requires internet-connected devices
I see an opportunity for much more reasonable legislation since this is a thing that the gov already controls.
The problem is everyone else’s kids is on social media. As a teenager I never had a Facebook account, but every other kid did and every event was organised and invites sent on Facebook.
It could have been done over sms, email, or any other private messaging, but because everyone was on Facebook, if you weren’t too, you weren’t invited.
yeah, but lot's of bad parents exist. Which is why there are laws around kids having to be in school, etc.
Maybe fine the parents if the kids get caught. Teaches them to teach their children better.
Simpler still, a “minor” bit on the phone, set by parents once. All services must respect the bit in http headers, and app stores should refuse to install certain apps. No need for id check
I imagine that many parent don’t want micromanage their kids apps, this takes care of the problem.
Almost all parents I know just let their kids use their phones. It's wild.
I’m in favor of this, but it doesn’t solve the full problem. If all your friends use social media as the fabric of their social interactions, you’ll be ostracized if you opt out as an individual.
IOW its a coordination problem. You need most of the other parents in your social group to also implement those controls.
This
The government shouldn't be parenting other parents kids
I mean, the government bans lots of things for under 18s. Gambling, alcohol, opening bank accounts, getting married are all restricted by governments. I’m not saying governments shouldn’t provide laws on what children can and can’t do, I’m saying that this law is a poor way of doing it.
>Interesting that Canada is trying to do the same thing. Seems suspiciously similar.
Australia already did. Commonwealth countries share a lot in common, and of course a lot of problems are common across many countries.
But let's be real -- these countries are announcing it in lockstep because the US is a corrupt plutocracy, and the lords of the nation like Mark Zuckerberg will run to Trump and he'll have a little tantrum (tantrums that always, it should be mentioned, just hurt Americans more. Everything is in the service of the billionaire class) about this.
It's tougher for that grifter to do so if so many countries do it simultaneously.
>The idea that this is about surveillance is also interesting.
What idea is that? That firms from foreign nations will gather IDs, of absolutely zero value for the country, to ensure age compliance? How does this silly conspiracy work?
Kids motivated will just get around it. But I think it's pretty clear at this point, given the idiocracies rising worldwide and how everything is getting stupider/worse, that social media has not been a net good.
I happened to talk to a teenage relative about this possibility the other day and she said that she'd be fine with a ban. It seems that it's not as big a deal if everyone's in the same boat. Parents genuinely have a hard time navigating this because drawing a line for their own children has the effect of socially excluding them.
It's not ideal in many senses (what age checks are we talking about here) but its worth thinking about some of the positive effects this might have on the young people growing up in the mess we've made of new media.
What do you think this will lead to? Will mesh networks explode in popularity or maybe the adults will just log their kids in - and UK will then make that illegal... But how to surveil the parents then.
Personally I fear this will just become whackamole against communication innovation. it feels to me like an addition in a broader attempt to control communications in general.
I hope it leads to people going outside and talking face to face again.
When you try to ban people from doing something they find ways to do it illegally. Humans have a need to socialize and kids are not going to stop using the internet for that just because of some law.
Aided by their parents, I'm sure, they will find seedier ways to do this. Ways that are not regulated at all, even by sensible laws that prevent direct exploitation. The parents obviously don't care that their kids use social media, otherwise they would take steps to stop it.
These laws are not going to bring back the days where we all were riding our bikes outside and reading physical books. That's not the way of life for these kids. But it's, very likely, going to put children in a more dangerous situation as they try to find some kind of solution to their social needs online.
Counterpoint - this is a coordination problem, there are studies suggesting that most kids would rather not participate in the whole social media thing but an individual can’t opt out.
It’s very possible that a policy like this could give everyone a new Schelling point to coordinate around, and thus change the default behavior.
We will see! I certainly agree this policy won’t prevent the kids that really want to use an app.
> When you try to ban people from doing something they find ways to do it illegally. Humans have a need to socialize and kids are not going to stop using the internet for that just because of some law.
They’ll do what my son has done his whole teenage life, having been banned from social media by me before he even asked for it, and go out and see their mates in real life !
The evidence of social media causing depression and anxiety in youth is mixed and almost all of the affirmative findings are correlational, so I expect to see a variety of takes in this comment thread.
Personally, the strongest positive evidence I've seen comes from the natural experiments tracking when high speed internet & phones were introduced geographically. Rates of teen depression do seem to topple in very close sync with this, as discussed here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
I still think we're solving social media from wrong angle. We should fix the addiction nature, so we can still use social media for informative purposes. (like hobby forums) Before the big platforms took over, there was lots rich information sources about tech and programming I wouldnt be there if those forums did not exist. Right now its just bunch negativity dopamine hits.
It's still weird how those social media bans are essentially "anything with chat/messages requires age check".
If social media is affecting learning, then ban using phones at schools, it's been very effective all around world with no privacy risks.
Password to bypass the Magna Carta and hundreds of years of reserving power to the British people: “Its4TheKids”
I agree that children under 16 should be limited in their exposure to social media but... I am deeply worried this will be used to either limit everyone else's access (particularly in "times of crisis") or may lead to a national identity requirement for accessing the internet. It's a little alarming the tech-minded public has not pushed back on this more.
Yeah where are the site banners? We had more for BLM than this.
Guess gone are the days of net neutrality and privacy protests by devs.
A lot of talk about the "why," absolutely nothing about the "how." The "how" is where the problem is.
Dead on. If we could wave our magic wands and ban "harmful social media" without negative externalities we'd probably do it, but we can't.
Sometimes I think legislators think laws are these magic documents which just directly mutate reality.
I'm absolutely fine with a social media ban for under 16s.
And completely against it actually meaning strong identification of over 16s.
I asked my Ouija board some questions and determined that:
- Select 3rd parties friends of government officials will be taxpayer funded to verify government ID's and live facial recognition.
- Said data will be "accidentally leaked" and somehow a myriad of 3rd parties and criminals end up with this data.
- People will be encouraged to purchase some form of identity protection monitoring service.
- People will conclude or theorize that all of this could have been avoided.
I have some ideas that could solve this without impacting anyone currently using the internet but there are no financial incentives for government officials to participate thus such ideas are dead in the water.
- It will somehow cost at least £1bn because everything costs £1bn these days
(NB it'll start off at a lower figure)
Didn't work in Australia, won't work in the UK.
Parents will just scan the kids in.
Can you provide some evidence that it didn’t work in Australia? Given the ban hasn’t been in place that long I’d like to see your sources about it not working.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/31/meta-...
Limited success might be a better term. But if a supposedly blanket ban only stopped 30% of under-16s accounts from accessing social media, that does seem pretty failure-esque.
This is a story about non-compliance. One hopes the Aus government is going to take some sort of enforcement action. If _that_ fails, then you could claim limited success or failure.
Presumably you wouldn't call laws against murder a failure because there are murders.
US prohibition was a failure. Mass noncompliance. Alcohol was and is popular! Many ordinary people hated the laws.
Murder is not popular. Murderers are thankfully rare, and they don’t comply with the laws on murder. The masses do.
When you make popular things illegal, you erode respect for the law and turn people against the government. You can (maybe) get away with this when times are good, but when times are not good you are doubling your problems. There is a spillover into other kinds of criminality as law-abiding people decide that the law may not matter as much as it once did. Ignore this at your own peril.
NTA but it's literally in the article.
When considering how to think about these restrictions, I turn to my 15 year old self back in the 90s and ask him "would you want the government to block you from using IRC, forums, guestbooks, and social web sites?"
His response would have been "go to hell", and he would have figured out a way to get around it anyways. Unless they're actually planning to track one government ID per person in a database, a truly horrifying idea that this project is slippery sloping towards (because if the current design is easily defeatable, then why do it at all?)
Having access to the entire internet, warts and all, as a kid did not ruin my life, it was an escape from the people I did not fit in with in the place I grew up, it taught me about humanity and ultimately led to a successful career for me.
Dave Bohnett, the founder of Geocities, stuck his neck out to protect the LGBT section of the site so that young adults could find a place to have community despite often growing up in places where it was dangerous to be gay, like it was for him when he grew up in a very conservative suburb of Chicago.
I don't think anyone has said more negative stuff about Facebook then I have, and I literally made a platform eager to try to destroy it, but this is not the way to do it. We should be thinking very, very carefully about when we let the government become our parents in scenarios like this when the unintended consequences seem quite likely be enormous and when there's no mechanism for retracting the law once it's implemented and we find out that, surprise surprise, it didn't magically cure depression in young adults.
Social media sites today are nothing like the forums and guestbooks of the 90s. Social media now is highly effective at developing addiction like symptoms as well as driving people to decisive topics and conspiracy theories. It has a measurable effect on teenagers wellbeing and academic performance too.
My bigger concern is the how rather than the why on this topic.
I'll agree with you that I'm far more worried about the how than the why, exponentially more worried.
I'm just not sure if "this time it's different". There was abundant decisive political smearing and conspiracy theories on Geocities. They had an entire section called Area51 (https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51). There was a politics neighborhood that had a bunch of crass political bashing (it's pretty funny to read about someone off his rocker about Janet Reno). There was also the Art Bell show playing in every radio market with him interviewing vampire experts and whatnot. The old Internet/culture really wasn't all that different than it is today.
I don't really care about a ban like this, but I do strongly care about exactly how they plan to enforce it. There are technical solutions which are both inexpensive, would be just as effective, and which would fully respect the privacy of all individuals.
But, regardless of whether the push is well meaning or not, the UK government has a historical track record of trying its best to eradicate the concept of an individual having any right to privacy from the government. A significant chunk of the population seems to even believe that wanting privacy from the government is a signal that you are doing something illegal.
People have been making comparisons to 1984 for years, but the current state of the UK should genuinely be raising alarms. It's like they're trying to compete with China for control over their population.
It’s pretty amazing how all major nations are using various reasons to force global ID and verification all at once isn’t it?
Doesn't even seem like various reasons.
Ultimately, if a kid is super digitally connected and using social media all day, can't his/her final grades be enough evidence?
I'd like to hear some arguments how we must ban certain technology in school; meanwhile it's plain to see to anybody with a brain cell that there is an entire corrupt stack from state government down to the individual classroom that *students must not be given failing grades*.
Here's a thought experiment: provide an opinion to both of these assertions. The rule of the experiment is you cannot give an opinion to one without answering the other.
- We should ban social media in school
- We should ban failing grades in school
Tbh, I think that this is still putting the blame on users and not in the actual tool designed to be as addictive as possible. It's like blaming people who get addicted to cigarettes.
In other words, governments around the world finally found the cheat code to demolish online anonymity.
To this I say: Hey kids, go grow your own groups using free/libre open source decentralised, distributed post-blockchain holochain-powered https://moss.social
So "login with Facebook" won't be an option anymore for kids.
A lot of reporting seems to state that it's only for "high risk social media". Is that the case? Are they really picking and choosing which social media they will ban for under 16s?
Nice, let's hope they will be using their creativity and smarts to understand deeply how tech works and bypass these or create their own spaces. We have high hopes for you young people.
Just ban social media.
Alternative title: ID verification to be required for all UK citizens to use social media
And as usual, no pro-privacy or pro-freedom groups were asked to give a comment for the article. I guess nobody objects on those grounds!
Well I needed a good reason to quit social media. This can be it.
He posted, on a social media website.
HN is not "social media," in a conventional sense, far from it. For one, it is completely anonymous, at least if you want it to be.
But under Ofcom rules, it is social media if we are to assume that they’ll apply the same scoping as the Online Safety Act does for user-to-user services. I think a lot of comments here assume that only sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter/X would be in scope, but I see no reason why they wouldn’t use the same definitions from the OSA (essentially any site where user-to-user communication and content posting takes place, including forums and aggregators).
If Reddit is "social media", so is HN.
hn is a user-to-user service
Which was not contradictory, as they were saying they wanted to quit. I also want to quit all social media, including hackernews, in the same way I want to quit eating Mcdonalds and getting high all the time.
I went back to the UK a few weeks ago for an old friend's wedding, and the ID verification process shocked me.
I think every country should adopt this actually. The sort of reasoning I see on social media shouldn't be exposed to children.
it's illegal for kids to vape too right? how's that working out?
(answer: https://ash.org.uk/resources/view/use-of-e-cigarettes-among-... )
The actual ban passed a couple months ago, after the data in your link was collected. But also, smoking bans (etc) had hugely positive effects on smoking rates. There's every reason to be positive.
Better than if it weren't illegal I'm sure. Also I think it is that it is illegal to sell kids vapes. It's not illegal for the kids to vape.
Wow looking at your history, please chill. You are very clearly related to the powers at be, i guess you feel unsafe unless uncle sam tucks you in at night. I feel sorry for you at this point...
So just do nothing, right?
Vaping prevalence among youth in UK has plateaued since 2022. So its slowly working.
Edit: as your own source conclude
Same as whenever they talk about banning anything in society… They can’t keep drugs, weapons, phones, etc. out of prisons, which are entirely under government purview. Elect clowns, expect a circus.
and what does that have to do with anything apart from diluting the point we have against the corrupt assholes.
Cry me a river. At least someone is trying
I agree that there are issues, but won't kids find other places to congregate? Maybe in educational sites?
Isn't that better? For one, they're connected to peers they have physically met. Additionally, they won't be exposed to strangers or ads that warp their world view.
I still believe that the government should ban unsolicited algorithmic content (so search engines are exempted), but this is a second best option.
Yes. Hopefully outside, in the park playing with a ball or running around.
Perhaps using anonymous registration-free platforms like Session
Great! Can we ban it for adults too?
Not sure if true (as it was on X) but I read that Bluesky would be exempt?
Good
Abstractly perhaps, but I'm not aware of any practical enforcement mechanism I'd classify as "good".
If the operators are liable, they will find a way, it's easy for the operators to infer a users age based on usage patterns. They must be required to close these accounts.
It doesn't need to be perfect, but in spite of that perfect is possible if people ask for it. Don't tempt them. Look at what happened in Spain with Cloudflare.
Are you saying that with the awareness that this will be used to remove privacy from social media?
And this will apply to everyone once you have to prove you are over 16.
If there was any smart way of doing it, we should block it for everyone. Very little good has come of it. Also solves the age verification problem. It’s soooo difficult to not fall into the addiction trap, and I’m exhausted from keeping myself away from it.
Fantastic idea. Now ban phones for under 16s as well.
the party of lord mandelson do not care about kids
Bluesky seems to be exempt, I wonder why.
Our governments seem to have just two tools for big issues in society (because they're quick and cheap):
- Nudging, propaganda, posters and automated announcements
- New legislation to ban something
If something can't be fixed with either of those, nothing gets fixed. Shockingly this happens a lot!
Their mates will make some money and lobbyists appeased, then they'll get distracted about what to ban and clutch pearls over next, and the issues our children have will persist and get worse
I like it. We don’t need social media. It is just a convenient way for the elites to collect data and push agendas, and people can communicate in other online ways without limiting themselves to short attention span, doom scrolling and others. TBH I’d be happy that it doesn’t exist.
Quebec has it, too. IMO it should be banned for under-18s instead of under-16s.
The only problem is how to enforce it.
Exactly, I stoped using all social media and I feel way better and my screen time went significantly down. It is harder to communicate with some people (have to use email or sms) but it reduced mostly meaningless small talk we can do in person.
"Think of the children" used to shoehorn in the police state. Shudder to think where this will be in 100 years.
100? More like 10.
have a short cartoon about the U.K. banning everything
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUep-4v_M9k
If they were really concerned, they'd be doing something about the algorithmic feeds pumping right wing vitreol into everything and Elon constantly begging for race wars to start.
It's very obviously not about the children.
When the OSA came into force I checked the iOS App Store and the top 10 apps in the UK at the time were all dodgy free VPNs. This legislation is utterly idiotic.
I'm sick of this government, they won't be getting my vote in the next GE.
Hear, hear!!!
Is social media bad for children? yes (heck it's even bad for adults)
Did the UK do this for good cause? absolutely not, they're doing this for the same purpose of all that age-verification bs.
Is it just me or did I missed a notice that Bluesky is not on the list of UK's banned social media?
Another headline about the Digital ID prison system they're building to identify and restrict all access to the Internet for people of all ages.
Then perhaps comes the mark which is about restricting and controlling what you're allowed to buy and sell.
Also, stop your BS about a prison system, its not whats going on globally. You are just buying into the BS that Facebook and company are sending you. Good on you for buying into their propaganda. The world existed before social media and it will keep existing.
OR we can try to move this to the positive side instead of fighting the fascists. We dont NEED social media, its a cancer on humanity. So maybe instead accept this BS and move it towards a place that we can all agree upon. I understand the UK political system is corrupt to its core, like all world goverments, but that's not the reason why to ignore and give in to what the government is demanding.
There will still be social media. Most of the public conversation will still take place there. You just won't be able to use it anonymously (possibly not even read it).
Maybe, in the future, the UK will thing twice before electing a socialist government.
It's supported by both major parties. Quite strongly by the Conservatives in fact
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