As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15 (or some other number, higher or lower I don't care). I'm pretty sure they're worse than cigarettes for the future of humanity.
Agreed. Teachers are seeing the massive benefits from banning phones entirely during school hours. I think once we get data from bans for certain things like social media for kids, we'll all want to get on the wave.
Teachers are not good indicators of measuring 'benefits', as they are both the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body, they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be, and they are also grading the success - which all too often comes down to compliance.
That's why if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are diametral or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test. If control group with smartphones gets consistently less points by graders who do not know them or their smartphone habits as compared to those who live in digital exile, we can talk. Until then, 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study. For me, that's an indication that the outrage is pearl-clutching.
> they are... the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body
> 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
To clarify, do you think that phones or the removal of phones leads to these outcomes? Do you think that teachers like or dislike phones? Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?
> they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be
Some do. Are teachers the only ones?
> if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are [detrimental] or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test.... Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study.
I am not sure how you would set this up in a way that does not fall victim to a dozen confounding variables. There have been comparisons of standardized tests before and after phone bans, of course, but those also fall victim to similar statistical issues.
You also can't have double-blind study on something both the participant and teacher know is present or not.... But that doesn't mean the study is invalid, it just means you have to account for it.
This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
> This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand that their children have smartphones at school).
> Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
> And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
I think there is a difference though. There is the "off my lawn" crowd of "children today are so bad because..." sure, but I think they are not the ones demanding social media bans. The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
> So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
> The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
Do the stats prove that cell phones are the cause of the dire mental health indicators? Or at least that there is a correlation?
Just the fuck you rich, I'm buying a football team for a laugh human beings. Not that Warren would necessarily buy a football team for laugh, but that "kind".
The issue isn't that billionaires aren't human, the problem very much is that billionaires are regular petty spiteful human beings with poor judgement, impulse control, odd beliefs and an the utter lack of checks and balances that can be disregarded when a human has a billion and more.
NotAllBillionaires, sure .. but it only takes a few to screw over millions of other humans on a whim.
Frankly, imho, billionaires shouldn't even exist. No one person can get that much wealth, that much power, that much influence, without losing their humanity, their decency. It's just not possible because the only way to accrue that much wealth is to do horrifically indecent things.
So, do I recognize what you're saying? Certainly. But I won't be shedding a tear of sympathy for them. I lose all sympathy for them when they step on the necks of everyday people to get where they are.
> This time might be different. But it's probably not.
And this is an appeal to tradition.
This article[1] from 2024 discusses this the studies on this topic. It seems to me the results are mixed, but conclusions range between social media being neutral to harmful. There is a lot in that article, so it's worth a read.
When appealing to the authority of academic studies, it's very important to be aware of the replication crisis for studies in the field of Psychology specifically, which is one of the worst offenders. Reproducibility has been found to be as low as 36% [1].
That was not an appeal to the authority of academic papers so much as the OP trying to give context for the information that has informed their position.
Your responses have been an appeal to tradition (“every generation thinks that”), and a dismissal of the information because of the reproducibility crisis.
Ie you are arguing that we (humans) struggle with discerning Truth, and therefore we are wrong, and everything is fine.
But taking the negative position is just as epistemologically flawed. Hence the OPs attempt to discuss the best data we can find.
Letting people figure out cigarettes were bad for them took a very long time, and if social media is another form of addiction why not treat it how we treat other addictive products?
We could assume that this time is different and people, well children and minors specifically, will learn to avoid the addiction rather than banning them like alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.
This time might be different. But it's probably not.
"but this time it's different" has also been a universal historical argument
>The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture.
Honestly you could just cut and paste the same arguments about jazz music in the 1920s or rock music in the later 20th century and they'd be indistinguishable. Just replace the mentions of jazz with social media topics and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether it was an article today or 100 years ago. "Health professionals" wringing hands about social media and jazz music in hilariously similar terms a century apart to a bunch of old people who are convinced the kids these days are going to shit because of the things they like to pay attention to.
Young people ARE SUPPOSED TO make poor decisions and be stressed out about it.
Middle aged people are supposed to clutch their pearls and wail about how this time it's different and truly awful (but what we did as kids was reasonable)
Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever.
My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
>My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard and if you have the attitude that things aren't hard that tends to be true. Don't set your kid up for failure.
Many countries have the driving license at 16. In France it’s accompanied by a parent; in USA it’s the full driving license (I’ve learnt at 13 and never had an accident for 30 years). 16 is ok if you withstand peer pressure.
Insurance and actuarial science is some of the most data-drivenwork we have. It is incredibly hard to withstand peer pressure and there is not much wrong in admitting what the data has already proven.
It's not that hard to drive a car! Unfortunately, physics motivates us to have unreasonable expectations of our drivers, like "doesn't drive off the road at 100km/h ever", and "avoids all obstacles all of the time". That's the hard part.
I did close to the same with my kids.. their PCs were in a common room, they got their first phone at 14 and it stayed at the downstairs charging station at night until 17. IMO it worked great and both our kids have a healthy relationship with their phones and tech in general.
I'm not sure how I feel about making it illegal, but it does benefit from some sort of collective action.
If none of your child's friends and classmates have cell phones yet, I'd strongly encourage establishing a smartphone pact with the other parents. Our community used http://waituntil8th.org pledges but even a shared spreadsheet would work.
> the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards
True, but that's why you don't do it alone. You need to talk with other parents and encourage them to talk to others until the majority of parents understand the risks and let the administration, school board, and teachers know that they have your support.
All that local level stuff doesn’t work. As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone, the online world becomes vastly more interesting than the day to day.
I can't speak to anyone else, but it seems to be working well enough in our town. The overwhelming majority of kids don't have cell phones until high school. That doesn't mean your kids won't beg you for a smartphone, it just means you can say "no" without socially isolating them.
> As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone
The point is to engage in collective action early enough that you can prevent these situations in the first place. Once a critical mass of kids have smartphones and their socialization and coordination moves to online spaces it becomes intensely isolating to be the only kid in a friend group without a smartphone.
Collective action that is effective is hard to pull off in a million homes a million times around the country. Most people without extra time and resources are just not going to do it which at this point is a large part of the country. It’s like advocating for town level collective action on alcohol or age of consent. It’s way more sensible to just make it law.
I fully agree. There should be a complete ban on social media and similar addictive platforms for those under 16, and a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users aged 16 to 18.
My wife and I have this discussion on a regular basis. We want kids, but we've both had to navigate technology usage without any guide, and I've personally experienced how ruinous a smartphone can be.
We want to teach our children how to _responsibly_ use technology. We're still not sure what that looks like in detail, but the general agreement we've come to is something like 'no screens before age X'.
Or parents could just take responsibility for their own children and not buy them a phone instead of outsourcing their parental responsibilities to the government.
Those very responsible would likely do that. But then you have a spectrum from "fully responsible but on occasions slip" to "not responsible at all". You can help some make the "good" decision and prevent others from making "bad" decisions. Hopefully those who grew up with healthier environments will have higher chances for becoming "fully responsible".
I would be pretty happy about social media being banned for everyone if not the immense possibilty for the government to abuse this law to disrupt undesired communication altogether.
Technically true but I've found it to be less addictive than other text forums (like the R-site and Lemmy), let alone the algo-powered video-based abominations that normies are all hooked on.
I'm thinking that it comes down to one thing in particular: the absence of response notifications. There's only so much addiction you can get out of a page of text without so much as a bell icon.
I know what you mean, but I think the issue is not social media, but rather big corporations being shitty. PepsiCo makes addictive beverages that cause people develop to diabetes and heart disease, but that doesn't mean beverages should be illegal. I think it would be better to regulate or ban the specifically harmful things, rather than a blanket ban on something that is actually useful. And like you alluded to, banning social media could easily lead to a general crackdown on freedom of expression, journalism, etc, now that it is the primary way people communicate with one another.
I'll also add that I'm not specifically opposed to banning minors from using social media. It would probably also be better if it was illegal for children to buy their own soda tbh.
Denmark's government has authoritarian aims and are one of the primary groups pushing chat control in the EU. I think you are falling for the "think of the children..." fallacy here.
This is a stepping stone towards further control elsewhere, especially once a framework for enforcement is in place (which nobody actually thinks about when emotionally reacting to feel-good ideas like this). How easy would it be to expand ID based age enforcement to tracking ALL online activity and cracking down on "non-approved" speech? No thanks. I'll handle parenting myself.
Also, if you don't care about the age number, and think social media is just objectively bad...why are you on this social media site? Isn't posting here the definition of hypocrisy...given you're supporting what you believe to be worse than cigarettes?
"Old media" was (and is) quite heavily regulated. Not everywhere turned into an East German surveillance state.
The idea that governments are incapable of acting in the interests of their citizens is just a narrative designed to weaken public democratic institutions and hand power to the real authoritarians.
I don't think HN is a social media site. The goals of a social media site is to keep you engaged for as long as possible with the assistance of various algorithms, dark patterns while your data is sold to businesses so they can have a slice of your attention pie via ads and supported content.
I dont feel as if any of that applies here. In fact HN has gotten further from a social media site by not displaying comment points.
You can argue this, but if you hand over this authority to government, it will not be up to you.
Fundamentally this is an upvote driven social media platform no different from Reddit, which everyone agrees is social media.
If you live in Denmark, get ready to tie your State ID to your HN profile to login and hope that you don't say anything that would make the wrong official (or your employer) upset with you.
As we know from history, well-intentioned government laws have zero unintended consequences, always work perfectly every time, and are very easy to remove once they've been created...
How about you parent your kid instead of trying to get the government to parent everyone else's? What the hell is you and everyone else's problem who want to get into other families' business.
It’s just easier to do some things if they’re prohibited by law. If you don’t want children to smoke, not selling them ciggarettes is a great first step.
Again, parent your kids. You clearly suck at it if you need the government to do it for you and you ruin society making it into an authoritian hellhole just because you have no backbone. Go live in an authoritian country where they ban everything instead of ruining what once where free countries.
Otherwise, don't have children if you lack the most basic of parenting skills.
Edit: you'd ask for bans on sex because you can't educate your children either, with the same line of reasoning. Religious like authoritianism.
you can take a teen’s phone off them and they can just walk into a store and buy an inexpensive second hand handset and use the WiFi from a local cafe.
The idea of treating under 18s like they are human is extremely undesirable in the USA because it among other things opens up a lot of doctors to be held accountable for their participation in the mass mutilation of baby boys. It also holds a whole lot of physically abusive parents to a standard where their children could call CPS and get their parents in legal trouble for corporal punishment.
Of course, these are indeed good things in worlds that don't endorse physical violence as the primary method to enforce control. This is why Finland his tail docking, ear cropping, animal crating, corporal punishment, circumcision, etc bans and why the US South is so ruthless.
To be fair, the "War on Tobacco" has actually been a huge success[1]. I've been saying for years that we should end the War on Drugs in its current form and extend tobacco policy to other drugs. If you're old enough to drink, smoke, and get shipped off to a warzone, who is anyone else to tell you that you don't deserve the freedom to buy a bottle of pharmaceutical-grade heroin at CVS and shoot it up in the privacy of your own home?
But because we collectively insist on infantilizing ourselves, hundreds of billions of dollars per year are redirected from the pharma industry to black market criminal syndicates. Instead of funding medical research and stock buybacks, we're actively choosing to fund global chaos and mass atrocities. We could stop tomorrow, and it would cost us nothing. In fact, it would save the US billions of dollars in annual losses at all levels of government and generate billions of dollars in annual tax revenue, all of which could be used to fund things like addiction treatment services, law enforcement, and border security.
> Dorothy, who runs an Ariana Grande fan account, was suffering through a typical teenage nightmare: Her mom took away her phone. But the resourceful teen didn't let that stop her from communicating with her followers. First, she started using Twitter on her Nintendo DS, a handheld video game device.
> Sometime after finding her DS, it was taken again, so Dorothy started tweeting from yet another connected device: her fridge. "My mom uses it to google recipes for baking so I just googled Twitter," she told CBS News.
Let's do away with the laws requiring shops to check ID before selling cigarettes. After all, a parent can simply tell their child not to smoke cigarettes and that's clearly good enough, right? All in the name of less government, which is clearly the most important priority here.
You make a persuasive case, but nicotine is genuinely addictive. Something to do with releasing stored glucose and substituting for food, and causing irritability on what I take to be a physiological level on withdrawal. Otherwise I'd agree.
But in this context, is it so important to distinguish between whether something is physiologically addictive vs. just seriously habit-forming? Except for substances where withdrawal is genuinely life-threatening, the practical difference seems to be in degree, not kind. Nicotine withdrawal causes irritability, but (I know having experienced both) so can breaking a bad social media habit.
(And it seems like there's a physiological basis to both cases, it's just that one involves endogenous chemicals and the other doesn't)
If all the other kids are on social media all the time, it makes it much harder to keep your kids off it. Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online? Would you want that for your kids?
Bans like this make much more sense at a community level. Not an individual level.
The idea that it's "hard" therefore we need government to save us is exactly why the program itself will never work. The problem is much deeper than law or government can fix.
You don’t need the government. Just some form of collective action.
I know of plenty of alternative communities & schools in which all the parents agreed to keep their kids away from phones until they were 15 or something. Great! If you try to roll something like this out to state schools, it looks like “the government”. But it’s the same idea.
I don’t understand the hatred and mistrust of government in this thread. The government protects us from lead in our food, from underage drug use, unsafe roads and lots of other stuff. Why not social media too?
> Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online?
I mean, who cares what the kid wants? It's your job as a parent to be a parent. Sometimes that means telling your kid no, even if that means they're not your best friend for a day or two.
> Would you want that for your kids?
Unequivocally, yes. Social media is cancer. I'd prefer my daughter not be pathologically depressed and my son not turn into a little hateball because of Meta's shitty algorithms. I have no idea why this is even a question, aside from the pure cowardice of Millennial parents.
None of this to comment on GP's suggestion that we don't need laws, or the idea that we shouldn't do this societally anyways.
Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level. This is terrible "we'll make it up on volume" logic.
It's also the justification used for some of the dumbest laws in history.
Think about what level of enforcement is going to be required for this (National IDs tied to online activity), and then think about the fact that Denmark is one of the main governments pushing chat control. Now start to think about how, once this tracking/enforcement scheme is created, that it might be expanded to things outside the scope of this law.
Like communism, this idea sounds good in theory, but is going to turn into an authoritarian nightmare in practice.
> Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level.
Social media itself doesn’t make sense at an individual level. If you’re the only one on a discord server, it’s not much of a party.
Personally I’m happy for some countries trying this. Let’s run the experiment and see how it goes. I too worry about the age verification system. Let’s see if the mental health of young people actually improves and by how much.
Rest assured, if the US couldn’t take collective action in the face of a global pandemic, there’s no way a law like this will come for America.
oh yeah, children famously do what their parents are told. especially when it comes to interacting with their friends. and they never are more adept at understanding technology and circumventing parental controls.
For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids. More importantly the constant appeal to the responsibility of parents misses that this is a collective action problem.
The reason most parents give up to regulate their children's online activity is because the children end up isolated if an individual household prevents their kid from socializing online. All the other kids are online, therefore switching individually ends in isolation. What might be beneficial for each household is unworkable as long as there is no collective mechanism. (which is the case for virtually every problem caused by social networks)
> For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids
This one hit me recently. My 4th grader has a friend who is on tik-toc and has a phone. Me, living in a bubble, where other parents I've met are terrified of social media and phones for their kids, was shocked when I met the mom and she wasn't aware of all the negative impact of social media. But, like with smokers, you can tell them it's bad for you but it's up to them to quit.
As a parent, you should be able to parent your child, rather than having the government arbitrarily and capriciously do so on your behalf, and for everyone else's kids, too.
As someone who got my first BlackBerry at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or led to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.
(Funny anecdote, but I didn't even figure out how to sign up for Facebook until I was 11-12, because I wouldn't lie about my age and it would tell me I was too young. Heh.)
First, if some parents let their kids use social media and some don't, all kids will eventually use it. You can't cut kids off from social spaces their peers are using and expect them to obey.
Second, this move by Denmark reflects a failure to regulate what social media companies have been doing to all their users.
e.g. What has Meta done to address their failures in Myanmar?[1] As little as was legally possible, and that was as close to nothing as makes no difference. More recently, Meta's own projections indicate 10% of their ad revenue comes from fraud[2]. The real proportion is almost certainly higher, but Meta refuses to take action.
Any attempts to tax or regulate American social media companies has invited swift and merciless response from the U.S. government. To make matters worse, U.S. law makes it impossible for American companies to respect the privacy of consumers in non-U.S. markets[3].
Put it all together, and American social media is something that children need to be protected from, but the only way to protect them is to cut them off from it entirely. This is the direct result of companies like Meta refusing to respond to concerns in any way other than lobbying the U.S. government to bully other nations into accepting their products as is.
Good on Denmark. I hope my own country follows suit.
Cultures around the world have barred children from certain social places until they go through a rite of passage that the whole society, not just the parents, recognize.
Yes, cultures around the world have done this through parents parenting their child successfully, and not through arbitrary government overreach telling you how to parent.
Not really. The ideal you are describing, where there is no role for the community in regulating public spaces outside the household and determining when young people can enter them, strikes me as highly unusual historically and geographically. It’s an example of that streak of libertarianism that took off from early American internet culture and hardly exists outside internet pontificating.
You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry—appropriate timing for a government to make a law to save kids from the evils of it.
> You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry
You're either operating with an anachronistic notion of what constitutes social media, or you're very out of touch with the public. Not sure which one.
The "myspaces" and "facebooks" are trending down, but other forms of social media like tiktok, discord, reddit, youtube, etc are alive and well, still hooking kids young as they always have.
i think the ban on youtube accounts will just be mildly inconvenient, like not being able to subscribe to channels, or chat in a livestream. they can't ban just watching youtube without an account.
The issue is rather the algorithmic feed optimized for grabbing our attention. It's definitely addictive and should be regulated like other drugs.
Give people technology, but let's have an honest conversation about it finally. As a adult it's already hard to muster enough self control to not keep scrolling.
Okay, so explain this to your child, just like you tell them they shouldn't do drugs. Are there not people who are sober by choice? The only thing preventing you from going and smoking crack right now is most certainly not because it's illegal, but because you make a choice not to do so, knowing the negative effects it has on you.
I don't scroll social media. When I was 14-17, sure. But then I lost interest, much like most of my peers did.
(I do probably refresh HN more than I should though, but I think that's probably the least evil thing I could do compulsively...)
The part you’re missing is that the decision to be online isn’t like choosing to do drugs. It’s closer to deciding to go to parties and socialise at all.
Social media for teens is ubiquitous and where your peers connect. It’s being included in your social group, not opt-in thrill seeking.
Most teens will have multiple accounts for various networks - private accounts for their friends, and then again for closer friends. Or they use apps like Discord that parents have no visibility into at all. There is a lot that most parents never see.
I don't think it will ever disappear, but it certainly plays a less outsized role now than it used to, and it's not exactly an industry I see huge growth in.
What we define as "social media" I think is important. I don't really consider things like TikTok to be "social media" even if there is both a social component and a media component, since the social part is much smaller in comparison to the media part. People aren't communicating on TikTok (I think), which is what people concerned about "being left out by their peers" would be referring to. This type of "social" media probably is not dying, but I think is likely stagnant or will become stagnant in growth, while traditional "social media" continues to regress over the next decade.
Parents are doing what they can, but it inevitably comes down to “but my friend x has it so why can’t I have it” - so all and any help from government / schools is a good thing.
This is so, so, so obviously a nasty, dangerous technology - young brains should absolutely not be exposed to it. In all honesty, neither should older ones, but that’s not what we’re considering here.
I think you are massively overstating how important it is to the kids that they have a social media account. How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?
Connecting online is the primary social space for many kids nowadays, not in person.
Some parents (or those without kids) have a bit of a naive view and think ‘social media’ and just imagine Facebook, instagram etc - things they understand and that don’t provide much connection.
The kids connect using private accounts, completely different apps, or even just inside the chat of other apps like games, if that is where your specific group hangs out.
I agree with what you're saying (including saying that arcfour is out of touch and doesn't really know what they're talking about), but... I do agree with them to an extent. And I have a kid (with another along the way). Kids adapt. They want to be on social media, or games, or Discord, or whatever because their friends are. If they have enough friends in real life doing something fun, that becomes where their specific group hangs out. The number of people you need in that group before it crosses that threshold is really low... 4, 5 people? That's all you need to have a tight knit friend group.
I've seen things like after school D&D club at the elementary school down the street where my son now goes to preschool. I'm optimistic that by the time he's older, there will be even more groups like this and more opportunities for him to have friends where they're doing activities that aren't mediated by screens.
To be clear, I'm not weighing on in on whether or not I think a ban is a good idea. I tend to think it is. But I do think the idea that there's nothing parents can do from the ground up without the help of government (which I'm not opposed to!) is also a bit misguided.
I don't, but I do have friends, and did have friends when I was a kid growing up during the rise and proliferation of social media and the beginnings of algorithmic content distribution, so I am familiar with it.
> How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?
Easy. If half the conversation happens online, and your kid wasn’t part of that, they’d constantly need to be “filled in” when they got to school.
Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it. You could still go to all the meetings, but there would have been conversations held and decisions made that you wouldn’t even know about. You would feel like you were on the out. Banning an individual kid from social media would be just the same.
Not necessarily a law, but it requires some form of collective action.
I highly recommend discussing a smartphone pact such as http://waituntil8th.org with fellow parents before anyone in their friend group gets a cell phone.
Lol you can order a cigar or pipe tobacco on the internet completely legally without any ID check. Most people don't know this. You can do it with wine, too, for the vast majority of the US. It's not really a problem.
I suspect you need a credit card though? Can kids sign credit card contracts without parent consent in the US?
Moreover just because that laws and regulations are applied inconsistently in the US (and we are talking about Denmark here), does not mean we should completely do away with them.
Not sure if it's changed but I had a debit card and bank account from age 15 when I started working as a kid. I got it without even involving my parents, not sure if you can still do that now, it was before the KYC stuff ramped up to the nines.
Comparing the internet we grew up with and the modern internet where a army of psychologists have been unleashed with the express intent to massively increase addiction to everything they touch is very foolish
This is not about telling kids no. This is about companies (and foreign hostile governments!) worth billions of dollars openly studying how best to prey on children's minds. There are things that are just poisonous to society as a concept.
The same people demanding the anti-smart phone laws will rat your ass out the second your kid is spotted walking alone, playing independently, etc. They want to put you in a catch-22 situation.
The real problem here is way less people are parents or people that have no idea what parenting is like, so they don't understand the practicalities of raising children so they come up with the dumbest laws possible and then lord it over you with the full weigh of the state so they can pretend to be parents but with none of the responsibility and all of the smug moral superiority.
Jonathan Haidt, the most prominent psychologist pushing for restrictions on social media use for children, is also the most prominent proponent of letting kids play and roam more freely. So no, those are not the same people.
As someone who sold their first joint at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or let to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.
/s
Absolute statements like yours rarely work, because the discussion is hardly ever about absolutes and more about where to draw the line.
It'll be interesting to see what they can cook up at home. Chat Control was pushed in large part by Denmark, and Minister of Justice Peter Hummelgaard is on record saying some pretty disturbing things regarding the right to privacy online.[1] Now for this, they don't need the entire EU to go along, and any laws already on the books might prove ineffective to protect against means that end up achieving similar goals to Chat Control.
Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph, as well as letters.[2] Turns out online messaging doesn't count. It'd be a funny one to get to whatever court, because hopefully someone there will have a brain and use it, but it wouldn't be the first time someone didn't.
Whether internet is covered by § 72 seems undetermined; as far as I can tell the Supreme Court hasn't made a decision on it; but considering that it considered fake SMS train tickets to be document fraud, even though the law text never explicitly mentions text messages: it seems clear that internet communication ought to be covered, if challenged.
Regardless, this wouldn't run afoul of this. This is similar to restricting who can buy alcohol, based purely on age; the identification process is just digital. MitID - the Danish digital identification infrastructure - allows an service to request specific details about another purpose; such as their age or just a boolean value whether they are old enough. Essentially: the service can ask "is this user 18 or older?" and the ID service can respond yes or no, without providing any other PII.
That's the theory at least; nothing about snooping private communication, but rather forcing the "bouncer" to actually check IDs.
> Regardless, this wouldn't run afoul of this. This is similar to restricting who can buy alcohol, based purely on age; the identification process is just digital. MitID - the Danish digital identification infrastructure - allows an service to request specific details about another purpose; such as their age or just a boolean value whether they are old enough. Essentially: the service can ask "is this user 18 or older?" and the ID service can respond yes or no, without providing any other PII.
> That's the theory at least; nothing about snooping private communication, but rather forcing the "bouncing" to actually check IDs.
Hopefully the theory will reflect the real world. The 'return bool' to 'isUser15+()' is probably the best we can hope for, and should prevent the obvious problems, but there can always be more shady dealings on the backend (as if there aren't enough of those already).
Given the track record of digitalization in Denmark, you can be rest assured this will be implemented in the worst possible way.
This is Denmark. The country who reads the EU legislation requesting the construction of a CA to avoid centralizing the system and then legally bends the rules of EU and decides it's far better to create a centralized solution. I.e., the intent is a public key cryptosystem with three bodies, the state being the CA. But no, they should hold both the CA and the Key in escrow. Oh, and then decides that the secret should be a pin such that law enforcement can break it in 10 milliseconds.
I think internet verification is at least 10 years too late. Better late than never. I just lament the fact we are going to get a bad solution to the problem.
>considering that it considered fake SMS train tickets to be document fraud, even though the law text never explicitly mentions text messages
That has nothing to do with the medium of the ticket and is all about knowingly presenting a fake ticket. The ticket is a document proving your payment for travel. They could be lumps of dirt and it would still be document fraud to present a fake hand of dirt.
Except the Supreme Court deemed the case to be of a principal nature, and granted relieve (i.e. no cost to either party), since it was disputed whether a fake SMS train ticket counted as document fraud.
> Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph
That's very much not how danish law works. The specific paragraph says "hvor ingen lov hjemler en særegen undtaglse, alene ske efter en retskendelse." translated as "where no other law grants a special exemption, only happen with a warrant". That is, you can open peoples private mail and enter their private residence, but you have to ask a judge first.
People continue to believe that the "Grundlov" works like the US constitution, and it's really nothing like that. If anything it's more of a transfer of legislation from the king to parliament. Most laws just leaves the details to be determined by parliament.
Censorship really is one of the few laws that are pretty unambiguous, that's really just "No, never again". Not that this stops politicians, but that's a separate debate.
And yet they wanted to push a proposal where the government would have free access to all digital communication, no judge required. So if it happens through a telephone conversation, you need a judge, while with a digital message, you wouldn't have, since the government would have already collected that information through Chat Control.
> All citizens are placed under suspicion, without cause, of possibly having committed a crime. Text and photo filters monitor all messages, without exception. No judge is required to order to such monitoring – contrary to the analog world which guarantees the privacy of correspondence and the confidentiality of written communications.
And:
> The confidentiality of private electronic correspondence is being sacrificed. Users of messenger, chat and e-mail services risk having their private messages read and analyzed. Sensitive photos and text content could be forwarded to unknown entities worldwide and can fall into the wrong hands.
> No judge is required to order to such monitoring
That sounds quite extreme, I just can't square that with what I can actually read in the proposal.
> the power to request the competent judicial authority of the Member State that designated it or another independent administrative authority of that Member State
It explicitly states otherwise. A judge (or other independent authority) has to be involved. It just sounds like baseless fear mongering (or worse, libertarianism) to me.
Didn't the proposal involve automated scanning of all instant messages? How isn't that equivalent of having an automated system opening every letter and listening to every phone call looking for crimes?
Not from what I can tell. From what I can read, it only establishes a new authority, under the supervision and at the digression, of the Member state that can, with judicial approval mandate "the least intrusive in terms of the impact on the users’ rights to private and family life" detection activities on platforms where "there is evidence [... ] it is likely, [...] that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material".
That all sounds extremely boring and political, but the essence is that it mandates a local authority to scan messages on platforms that are likely to contain child pornography. That's not a blanket scan of all messages everywhere.
> platforms that are likely to contain child pornography
So every platform, everywhere? Facebook and Twitter/X still have problems keeping up with this, Matrix constantly has to block rooms from the public directory, Mastodon mods have plenty of horror stories. Any platform with UGC will face this issue, but it’s not a good reason to compromise E2EE or mandate intrusive scanning of private messages.
I would not be so opposed to mandated scans of public posts on large platforms, as image floods are still a somewhat common form of harassment (though not as common as it once was).
The proposal is about deploying automated scanning of every message and every image on all messaging providers and email client. That is indisputable.
It therefore breaks EtoE as it intercepts the messages on your device and sends them off to whatever 3rd party they are planning to use before those are encrypted and sent to the recipient.
> It explicitly states otherwise. A judge (or other independent authority) has to be involved. It just sounds like baseless fear mongering (or worse, libertarianism) to me.
How can a judge be involved when we are talking about scanning hundreds of millions if not billions of messages each day? That does not make any sense.
I suggest you re-read the Chat control proposal because I believe you are mistaken if you think that a judge is involved in this process.
I dispute that. The proposal explicitly states it has to be true that "it is likely, despite any mitigation measures that the provider may have taken or will take, that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material;"
> How can a judge be involved
Because the proposal does not itself require any scanning. It requires Member states to construct an authority that can then mandate the scanning, in collaboration with a judge.
> it is likely, despite any mitigation measures that the provider may have taken or will take, that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material
That is an absolute vague definition that basically encompasses all services available today including messaging providers, email providers and so on. Anything can be used to send pictures these days. So therefore anything can be targeted, ergo it is a complete breach of privacy.
> Because the proposal does not itself require any scanning. It requires Member states to construct an authority that can then mandate the scanning, in collaboration with a judge.
Your assertion makes no sense. The only way to know if a message contains something inappropriate is to scan it before it is encrypted. Therefore all messages have to be scanned to know if something inappropriate is in it.
A judge, if necessary, would only be participating in this whole charade at the end of the process not when the scanning happens.
> [...] By introducing an obligation for providers to detect, report, block and remove child sexual abuse material from their services, .....
It is an obligation to scan not a choice based some someone's opinion like a judge, ergo no one is involved at all in the scanning process. There is no due process in this process and everyone is under surveillance.
> [...] The EU Centre should work closely with Europol. It will receive the reports from providers, check them to avoid reporting obvious false positives and forward them to Europol as well as to national law enforcement authorities.
Again here no judge involved. The scanning is automated and happens automatically for everyone. Reports will be forwarded automatically.
> [...] only take steps to identify any user in case potential online child sexual abuse is detected
To identify a user who may or may not have shared something inappropriate, that means that they know who the sender is, who the recipient was , what bthe essage contained and when it happened. Therefore it s a complete bypass of EtoE.
This is the same exact thing that we are seeing know with the age requirements for social media. If you want to ban kids who are 16 years old and under then you need to scan everyone's ID in order to know how old everyone is so that you can stop them from using the service.
With scanning, it is exactly the same. If you want to prevent the dissemination of CSAM material on a platform, then you have to know what is in each and every message so that you can detect it and report it as described in my quotes above.
Therefore it means that everyone's messages will be scanned either by the services themselves or this task will be outsourced to a 3rd party business who will be in charge of scanning, cataloging and reporting their finding to the authorities. Either way the scanning will happen.
I am not sure how you can argue that this is not the case. Hundreds of security researchers have spent the better part of the last 3 years warning against such a proposal, are you so sure about yourself that you think they are all wrong?
> This is taken verbatim from the proposal that you can find here
You're taking quotes from the preamble which are not legislation. If you scroll down a little you'll find the actual text of the proposal which reads:
> The Coordinating Authority of establishment shall have the power to request the competent judicial authority of the Member State that designated it or another independent administrative authority of that Member State to issue a detection order
You see, a judge, required for a detection order to be issued. That's how the judge will be involved BEFORE detection. The authority cannot demand detection without the judge approving it.
I really dislike you way of arguing. I thought it was important to correct your misconceptions, but I do not believe you to be arguing in good faith.
Let me address your points here and to make it more explicit, let me use Meta/Facebook Messenger as an example.
> You see, a judge, required for a detection order to be issued. That's how the judge will be involved BEFORE detection. The authority cannot demand detection without the judge approving it.
Your interpretation of the judge's role is incorrect. The issue is not if a judge is involved, but what that judge is authorizing.
You are describing a targeted warrant. This proposal creates a general mandate.
Here is the the reality of the detection orders outlined by this proposal:
1: A judicial authority, based on a risk assessment, does not issue a warrant for a specific user John Doe who may be committing a crime.
2: Instead, it issues a detection order to Meta mandating that the service Messenger must be scanned for illegal content.
3: This order legally forces Meta to scan the data from all users on Messenger to find CSAM. It is a blanket mandate, not a targeted one.
This forces Facebook to implement a system to scan every single piece of data that goes through them, even if it means scanning messages before they are encrypted. Meta has now a mandate to scan everyone, all the time, forever.
Your flawed understanding is based on a traditional wiretap.
Traditional Warrant (Your View): Cops suspect Tony Soprano. They get a judge's approval for a single, time-limited wiretap on Tony's specific phone line in his house based on probable cause.
Detection Order: Cops suspect Tony “might” use his house for criminal activity. They get a judge to designate the entire house a "high-risk location." The judge then issues an order compelling the homebuilder to install 24/7 microphones in every room to record and scan all conversations from everyone (Tony, his family, his guests, his kids and so on) indefinitely.
That is the difference that I think you are not grasping here.
With E2E, Meta cannot know if CSAM is being exchanged in a message unless it can see the plain text.
To comply with this proposal, Meta will be forced to build a system that bypasses their own encryption. There is no other way.
This view is shared by security experts, privacy organizations, and legal experts.
You can read this opinion letter from a former ECJ judge who completely disagrees with your view here:
I am sorry if you think that I am arguing in bad faith. I am not.
While there is nothing I can do to make you like my arguing style, just know that I am simply trying to make you understand your misconceptions about this law.
> Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph, as well as letters
And this is why laws should always include their justification.
The intent was clearly to protect people - to make sure the balance of power does not fall too much in the government's favor that it can silence dissent before it gets organized enough to remove the government (whether legally or illegally does not matter), even if that meant some crimes go unpunished.
These rules were created because most current democratic governments were created by people overthrowing previous dictatorships (whether a dictator calls himself king, president or general secretary does not matter) and they knew very well that even the government they create might need to be overthrown in the future.
Now the governments are intentionally sidestepping these rules because:
- Every organization's primary goal is its own continued existence.
- Every organization's secondary goal is the protection of its members.
Banning personalised ads would solve a lot of the underlying incentives that drives the attention grabbing economy today.
Increasing the age a few years for when young people are allow to make accounts on social media is not going to make a large difference in the big picture of things, and do not address the core problem that is the collection and abuse of massive amounts of personal data.
Upping the age limit a few years is a compromise that big tech can live with. Here in Norway, we've had a 13 year limit for years, but most parents have not cared so far and help their kids register at a much earlier age anyway. This is changing though, as more people realise the downsides of addictive and manipulative apps fighting desperately for our data and attention.
It is frustrating to see how unwilling we are to address the economic incentives that causes the biggest harms.
I'm in favour of anything that tries to address the appaling effects of social media, but as long as there is advertising that will, surely, be some sort of personalisation. In the past you bought a magazine about, say, gardening, and all the ads were about gardening. The advertisers were betting that most people reading a gardening magazine were interested in gardening products, the ads were, to some degree, personalised.
If online 'personalised' ads were banned how would personalised be defined ?
If the goal is simply to make social media unprofitable, you can just be really brutal and require that all users from a language region visiting a website (or using an App) must be delivered the exact same set of ads.
The fact that most advertisers would flock to promoting on smaller special websites/apps (equivalent to your gardening magazine), is exactly the side-effect we want. The shift in spending will hopefully lead to the current "massive social media platform" model will dying out, and boosting smaller independent platforms.
Seems like an attempt to enforce government ID identification and destroy online anonymity to «protect the children», the very same way it's been done in Britain.
How will they achieve that without introducing a requirement to identify yourself on every online platform, which some would say is probably the whole reason for introducing something promoted as being "for the children"™.
You don't think that the digital ID provider is keeping logs of which sites requested to verify which users? Even government websites are not exactly known for their high security.
The digital ID provider is only involved in issuing the ID to you. When you use that ID to verify age to a site the only communication is between your phone and the site. The ID provider has no idea when you use the ID, how often you use the ID, or where you use the ID.
Briefly, when the ID provider issues the ID it gets cryptographically bound to your phone. When you use the ID to prove something to a site (age, citizenship, etc) the is done by using a zero-knowledge proof based protocol that allows your phone to prove to the site (1) that you have an ID issued by your ID provider, (2) that ID is bound to your phone, (3) the phone is unlocked, and (4) the thing you are claiming (age, citizenship, etc) matches what the ID says. This protocol does not convey any other information from or about your ID to the site.
The difference is meaningful. It's mostly prisoners dilemma. If only one persons porn habit is available thats bad for them. If everyones (legal) porn habits are available, then it gets normalized.
this seems to run parallel to the "i have nothing to hide" / "well they have everyone's data, so who cares about mine" arguments.
this is too narrow a view on the issue. the problem isn't that a colleague, acquaintance, neighbor, or government employee is going to snoop through your data. the problem is that once any government has everyone's data, they will feed it to PRISM-esque systems and use it to accurately model the population, granting the power to predict and shape future events.
Normalized or not, the risk is you get something akin US drug enforcement: ignored for certain demographics, enforced for others. The ability to see someone's porn history is irrelevant until a government (or employer perhaps) wants to weaponize it.
The problem isn't my peers, it's the people in power and how many of them lack any scruples.
Would social networks accepting Danish users have to implement the other end of that, or will they also be allowed to use less privacy-oriented age verification solutions (e.g. requesting a photocopy of the user's ID)?
It seems to me like it's either a privacy disaster waiting to happen (if not required) or everyone but the biggest players throwing out a lot of bathwater with very little baby by simply not accepting Danish users (if required).
The wording on the page also makes it sound like their threat model doesn't include themselves as a potential threat actor. I absolutely wouldn't want to reveal my complete identity to just anyone requesting it, which the digital ID solution seems to have covered, but I also don't want the issuer of the age attestation to know anything about my browsing habits, which the description doesn't address.
> everyone but the biggest players throwing out a lot of bathwater with very little baby by simply not accepting Danish users (if required).
The biggest players in social media are precisely the ones that this law is targeting.
No one in charge of implementing this law is going to care whether some Mastodon server implements a special auth solution for Danish users or not, they are going to care that Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc. do so.
the social media platforms already measure more than enough signals to understand a users likely age. they could be required by law to do something about it
It would be a lot simpler to only sell standard devices to adults. Kids should be using devices with curated access to specific tools and platforms meant for children.
we get to see how it works in australia next month. there's already stories of kids putting on fake mustaches to fool age-of-face recognition, which is one of the methods used.
i think it'll get to: "these methods aren't good enough, we'll have to enforce digital id".
Child abuse is already illegal, the law needs to be expanded to cover these new forms of harm to children. It seems reasonable that I am held criminally accountable if I expose my child to harmful Internet content like social media.
the EU is working on a system for age verification that won't identify you to the platform. The details are of course complicated, but you can imagine an openid like system run by the government that only exposes if you're old enough for Y.
The platforms asks your government if you're old enough. You identify yourself to your government. Your government responds to the question with a single Boolean.
You don't need to, that's the thing. The site requests "are you over 18" and you use your ID to prove it without them getting any other information from it. Requires a phone with NFC, but the app is open source
I think that ends up being a more difficult problem than just open source. There will have to be some cryptography at play to make sure the age verification information is actually attested by your government.
It would be possible for them to provide an open-source app, but design the cryptography in such a way that you couldn't deploy it anyway. That would make it rather pointless.
I too hope they design that into the system, which the danish authorities unfortunately don't have a good track record of doing.
And the reference implementation requires google play integrity attestation so you are forced to use a google approved device with google approved firmware and a google account to download the application in order to participate. Once this becomes implemented, you are no longer a citizen of the EU but a citizen of Google or Apple and a customer of the EU:
How does the site verify that the ID being used for verification is the ID of the person that is actually using the account? How does the site verify that a valid ID was used at all?
If the app is open source, what stops someone from modifying it to always claim the user is over 18 without an ID?
*Only for Google Android and Apple iOS users. Everyone else who don't want to be a customer of these two, including GrapheneOS and LineageOS users, will have to upload scans of identity papers to each service, like the UK clusterfuck.
Source: I wrote Digitaliseringsstyrelsen in Denmark where this solution will be implemented next year as a pilot, and they confirm that the truly anonymous solution will not be offered on other platforms.
Digitaliseringsstyrelsen and EU is truly, utterly fucking us all over by locking us in to the trusted competing platforms offered by the current American duopoly on the smartphone market.
It sounds extreme, but I support banning usage of anything that runs software for children under 13. Under 13, children are still developing their minds, it is important for their welfare that they learn how to function without technological dependencies.
You know how in school they used to tell us we can't use calculators to solve math problems? Same thing. It can't be done by individual parents either, because then kids would get envious and that in itself would cause more problems than it would solve.
It is important for kids to get bored, to socialize in person, to solve problems the hard way, and develop the mental-muscles they need to not only function, but to make best use of modern technology.
It is also important that parents don't use technology to raise their children (includes TV). Most parents just give their kids a tablet with youtube these days.
This is very extreme take. I learned to program at age 10. It is an amazing tool for mind development. Had to invent sine and cosine tables to make my computer games, before even encountering the concept at school.
Is that survivor's bias? there are many other mental development goals chidren should have. for the very small number of children that will learn to program at that age, there is no harm in delaying it a few years, but for the vast majority whose development would be stunted, or worse, they'll be harmed.
Some kids learn to drink and smoke at a that age too, and many turn out ok.
same and about the same age. however, completely different times. I thought about this a lot and have safely concluded that if I was 9-10 years old now programming would quickly turn into gaming and doom scrolling and … given a choice now of not being exposed to it at same age or nothing until say HS I would choose the latter
Speaking as someone in their 20s - no, I don't think it's a "completely different time". Just 10 years ago, I first learned programming from scripting languages; SourcePawn from Team Fortress 2, and Lua from Roblox/GMod. Predators, hive minds, and self-destructing behavior from children wasn't suddenly invented or rejuvenated after 2016.
All 3 were a total hotbed of bad influences for a child: Team Fortress had trade pub servers with people doing sprays of literal CP and wearing custom lewd skins to harass users with them - and people with very questionable social skills and intentions huddled up in realtime microphone comms with children, Roblox's predator problem for the last 14+ years (at least that I can attest) is suddenly en vogue now that they're a public company and there's stock shorting to be had, GMod is still the community with the most colorful vocabulary I've ever encountered - plus grooming. And much more.
Indeed, you can (and I did) get burned by these actualities when exposed to such communities in your youth - and it can cost you real money, real time, real idealism/innocence, and real mental health. However, I think being exposed to softwares, systems and games that inspired curiosity and led me toward a path of WANTING to contribute brought me to this software development career and life path, and it would have been much more inaccessible and unknown to me in any other way. And I favorited a comment from another HN user a few days ago that goes in astute depth on why that path can only be organically introduced and self-governed [1].
I referred to these places earlier in my comment as "bad influences". I think the single-most powerful thing a parent can do tasked with this dilemma - especially during an upbringing in systemically hard, uncertain, and turbulent times - is teaching them how to identify, avoid, and confront bad influences. Equipped with that, and knowing how to handle yourself, is of utmost importance.
Would it have made a big difference if you learned to code at 13? Is there a pressing need as to why kids need to code at a young age? Maybe there could be exceptions for children that develop sooner? If your other developmental metrics were met early on, I don't see why an earlier age would be a problem.
I don't know, maybe? Maybe it's not up to the state to decide whether my kids developmental metrics allows them screen time before age 13? What kind of nanny state is that?
I don't think that's a nanny state. you can't give your kid alcohol for example at that age, let them drive, get married (don't get me started on some countries!), operate a chainsaw or other dangerous machinery.
This is a danger to their mental development. Look at teacher forums all over. r/Teachers on reddit should be illuminating. Tech and parents sticking devices to their kids instead of raising them properly has resulted in utter disaster. If there was no harm imposed on children, I would agree that it is a nanny-state thing.
> Would it have made a big difference if you learned X at 13?
Yes. Kids getting access to knowledge that clicks with them earlier than later makes a huge difference.
Which is exactly why so many people are rushing in to control what kids get exposed to. You seem to have pretty strong thought on the issue yourself, if you agree on the possible negative impact, you can't also deny the possibility of positive impact.
The dose makes the poison, I think we can understand how extreme position tend to bring more negative than positive consequences, regardless of the rethoric.
I generally agree. But so much software today is useless without a network connection. Online help (anybody remember those chm files?) was often very very good, because it was supposed to be _the_ documentation for most software.
I don't know much about the Amish, so I can't comment.
Teaching kids how to code isn't all that meaningful on its own. knowing what to do once you learn how to code is. If your plan is to teach your kid how to code, teach them to solve problems without code at that age. Unless you're serious about thinking learning at age 5 vs age 13 would make a big difference.
I think every kid 13 and above should have an rpi too.
I think you're missing the point. 5 year old me was writing their own computer games and at no point did I need or ask my parents how to do it (though they did buy the computer; thanks mum and dad!), they didn't know.
There were a plethora of books in the library on how to program, and here you are suggesting I, and everyone like me, be banned from doing so. You'd probably also ban me from the library by assuming I couldn't read aged 5. I certainly could, especially computer manuals. The computer was an amazing thing which did exactly what I told it, and I learned quickly how precise I needed to tell it, and when I made a mistake, it repeated my mistakes over and over without noticing. I learned more about digital ethics age 5 trying to write games than the typical CEO learns going on a "Do Not Create The Torment Nexus" course.
You'd insist I not be allowed to even use software, let alone write my own. You'd be actively cutting off my future professional life, and depriving entire nations of bedroom programmers cum professional software engineers, with your ill-thought-out ban.
If your children show an aptitude or a fascination for a topic, I hope you feed that and praise them for it.
I think books are great, provided they're age appropriate.
First, my proposal is a delay, not a ban. This is such a good idea, that a lot of FAANG CEO's are doing this for their kids welfare (more or less) already.
I think the overall welfare of kids should be weighed against the benefits.
I think you should have been learning to tinker with electronics, solve math algorithms and develop all kinds of curiosities. the future of being a programmer involves competing with LLMs, you have to be good at knowing what to program. Humans aren't needed when it comes to simply knowing how to write code.
I acknowledge that there will be exceptions, and perhaps that should be considered. but also lookup terms like "ipad babies" and how gen-alpha is turning out. Most parents don't teach their kids how to code in basic. and content regulation for kids is futile, unless you want the government monitoring your devices "for the children's sake".
> If your children show an aptitude or a fascination for a topic, I hope you feed that and praise them for it.
Same, but I hope you let them learn things in the right order and consider their overall long term wellbeing instead of temporary satisfaction. Children did fine without computers for all of humanity's history. the nature of children hasn't changed in the past 3 decades. What you consider feeding might actually be stagnating. If there is a good and practical way to make sure that children are developed well enough to interact with computers, and we can also make sure that the content they consume is age-appropriate without implementing a dystopian surveillance state, i'm all for it.
But pretending the problem doesn't exist, and letting 99% of children suffer because 1% of kids might learn BASIC doesn't sound like a good plan.
I think a better distinction is internet enabled software.
I had a good time programming BASIC on my V-Tech pseudocomputer, at age 9. But that's a world away from tiktok, reels and the predatory surveillance economy.
I think my proposal is easier for parents to enforce, and programming can wait. matter of fact, programming isn't a special skill to learn.
You can teach kids electronics, have them construct toys that work on batteries,etc... work on components that don't require programming. teach them algorithms, math, crypto,etc.. without using computers.
If you're teaching kids how to code, you should give them the skills that will help them learn _what_ to code first?
Do fulcrums even exist, as independent physical objects? What you say about them not being addictive tempts me to do an entire packet of fulcrums, but I don't know where I could buy any or what they'd look like.
This ban (or attempt to regulate), similar to Australia's, is at least 10-15 years too late to be honest. It likely would have stopped or lessened the negative impact of FB (and its ilk, but mostly FB, tbh) on much of the society.
Now we know, of course, and everything in hindsight is 20/20.
It's STILL worth trying to regulate social media, now emboldened and firmly established as a rite of passage among youth, adults, and older generations.
Basically, when network connectivity increases, the "bad" nodes can overwhelm the "good" nodes. The other ideas discussed are really interesting; well worth watching.
I was thinking I know a few people over 65 who are being radicalised, might be an idea to ban it for them too.
The serious answer is that banning "social media" is a bit silly. We should concentrate on controlling the addictive aspects of it, and ensuring the algorithms are fair and governed by the people.
Even if you're half-joking, there's a very real point to this. It's really not solving the problem. It's moving it very so slightly down the line.
I'm not entirely sure how I'd want to word it, but it would be something like: It is prohibited to profit from engagement generated by triggering negative emotions in the public.
You should be free to run a rage-bait forum, but you cannot profit from it, as that would potentially generate a perverse incentive to undermine trust in society. You can do it for free, to ensure that people can voice their dissatisfaction with the government, working conditions, billionaires, the HOA and so on. I'd carve out a slight exception for unions being allowed to spend membership fees to run such forums.
Also politicians should be banned from social media. They can run their own websites.
In principle, certainly. In practice, Congress can't be trusted to craft more or less any law these days. I'm not necessarily sure that the law will be able to help us here, but I also think it's not helpful to take the broadest possible definition of social media to try to shutdown discussion. (I'm not suggesting that you are doing that)
Australia's soon-to-take-effect ban affects nine platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, but not HN. These bans often operate on the amount of users a platform has, so HN is unlikely to make the cut. Nobody cares about this site.
I'd gladly give up HN if it means Instagram and Facebook are eradicated. Yes, yes, "those that would trade liberty for security...", but we were better off without any form of social media at all.
I often wonder if posts like this, along with the people who want to ban all cars, etc are just rage bait. Fortunately most of the population disagrees with your preferences. I give “general social media ban” around a 1% chance of success.
I'm curious as to how social media gets defined for these bans.
I presume text messaging doesn't count whereas Discord/WhatsApp do? What about Minecraft and other games? What about school platforms which they can post comments/messages on? Is watching YouTube included? When I've filled in surveys about our children's social media use, they have included YouTube, which makes it look like every child is on social media.
It does not really require a lot of nuance. Any platforms serving short-form content using algorithmic recommendations, giving any random account infinite reach, a la Instagram/Tiktok/Youtube/Shorts/Reels/Redbook/etc are part of the problem.
WhatsApp groups are a source of slightly different issues - fake news, radicalization, social bubbles - but not a source of addiction to the same level, especially among the young.
Why don't governments start at the source instead of at the access?
I always have questions that go a bit deeper but maybe because I think differently. I understand it can trample on rights, but I guess I like to still ask and have the thought experiment anyway.
If things like this are so harmful, and it's recognized why is it okay for a parent to give their child access to it in the first place?
Why do kids get to control what they have access to just because parents don't want to parent well, and because they think it'll be a death sentence for their kids social groups? Is it feasible to police parents in that way? Would we even want that?
Think of it similar to alcohol laws. E.g. in the US you don't just want kids to be unable to buy alcohol when their parent is present, you want the point of access to participate in that restriction or it won't work in practice because getting 100% of kids to have good judgement all of the time (or watching them constantly for their whole life) is not realistic. At the same time, many states still have laws allowing alcohol consumption by minors in the presence of their parent because it's really hard to get everyone to agree on a universal binary cutoff with no exception.
In practice, the law does help greatly in spite of not being a mathematical proof the minor will no longer get alcohol because of "parenting well" alone and almost all parents are fine with the restrictions, even in places without the flexibility, because they've come to see and agree with the level of harm over the years. Ie. there is a point enough parents agree strongly enough that the common good of children is accepted over the rights of a parent to decide their child's welfare - it's just usually a hogh bar (e.g. how far punishment can go before it turns into abuse, as another example).
I don't know if that can be implemented, but to me it seems the main problem is the algorithmic feed. I think I would be okay with kids having access to social media, but only if they can't get personalized feed, but can see their friends and maybe specific topics.
> The move would give some parents — after a specific assessment — the right to let their children access social media from age 13. It wasn’t immediately clear how such a ban would be enforced: Many tech platforms already restrict pre-teens from signing up. Officials and experts say such restrictions don’t always work.
This makes it almost sound like a no-op once enough children convince their parents to give exemptions. Hopefully it works out better than that.
The problem is not "social media", that's just an insanely broad and poorly category. HN is probably "social media". Many games are probably "social media".
The problem is that certain platforms exploit people for profit by feeding them crap, from political propaganda to ads for weight loss drugs. Many of them are designed to be addictive so folks can keep up "engagement". Enough eyeballs make all crap profitable, or something like that.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are tons of great platforms that young people can benefit from, and vice versa. Including HN. Many subreddits. Tons of forums. Loads online games.
Ban the exploitation. Ban the propaganda. Ban the abuse. But don't ban young people.
That's probably the solution: You can run a social media, but you have to do it ad free. Charge people if you need to, but you cannot run ads. What fucks up social media is the constant need to "engagement".
this is a familiar discourse. Ads are more than a thing you "run," they're an idea. You can't destroy the idea of ads. "Ad free" isn't possible to guarantee. Does this make sense?
Laws don't require foundation let alone scientific evidence. If either were the case laws would rarely be passed. For Denmark I'd assume it's just vibes among the law makers social class. They have a worldview and by God they will impose it.
my kid and me when I was a kid and my Mom and Dad when they were kids have been creators. you don’t need a fucking phone or “social” media to be a creator, what nonsense!
You usually apply bans like this to something that is unhealthy for _everyone_ e.g. smoking. So why isn't the focus on regulating social media to be better? It seems like it's not great for the whole population in its current form.
Generally those don't have population wide, negative impacts (except maybe drinking). I would compare it more to smoking which is considered a public health issue and we regulated smoking out of the market through a combination of safety regulations, limitations on marketing etc. Age bans were part of that but the ID checking requirements there were substantially less risky due to little no risks of retention.
Your initial comment may not have been well stated.
It asserts that underage bans are usually applied to things that are unhealthy for all.
You follow that by stating that provided examples of underage bans are things that are not things with negative impacts on populations.
I'd suggest that real world examples exist of adolecsent alcohol induced brain damage, drivers 10-16 having higher rates of accidents causing death and injury, child soldiers having a negative impact on society, industrial scale under age sex in Christian Brother homes having bad outcomes, early exposure to excessive porn being cited as causing brain rot and social malfunction, etc.
As for:
> we regulated smoking out of the market through a combination of safety regulations, limitations on marketing etc.
I'd point to Australia that started down that path with good results, and continued further only to regulate tobacco out of "regular" markets into the embrace of black markets that come with worse problems than the older established markets that "had a code" (established criminals rarely went after family or indiscriminately acted such that bystanders were killed or injured).
You raise interesting questions that deserve deeper thought and consideration.
Germanys ID has the technical means to allow something like that (age verification without disclosing identity), but knowing the German Gov and their absolute stasis something like this will never happen. It is absolutely necessary to do something like this, because social media has a net negative influence on society.
A lot of kids in my daughters class (~7yo's) are consuming brain rot content already. They shout "SIGMA BOY" or "SKIBIDI TOILET" like little retards during lessons. Yeah memes are cool and all, but not at this age.
i am thankfull for cellphoneless childhood. Wishing same thing upon my children. Worst thing about all of this is the peer pressure, if all your friends have a phone then you become an outcast, so it is a team effort from all parents.
>Denmark's government aims to alienate hundreds of thousands of citizens
And people wonder why governments fail. Every time you carve out exceptions you are hollowing out the foundation of your government.
Children of the elite' access to social media will remain of course, can't hollow out your true foundation
I am a dissenter. A ban for children is onerous and how can it be enforced? Who will be punished for infractions?
Better a legal code of conduct for platforms that want to raise revenue in your jurisdiction (the important ones, that the state has leverage over). The code should do two things:
1. Prohibit the targeting of individuals below 21
2. Mandate moderation of spaces where young people gather, with resources to enforce it
A ban is much more satisfying to the do goobers and much worse for those it is supposed to protect
The one thing I don't see and always wonder about with these sorts of things is how they define "social media". Seems like a tough thing to do - if you cast too broad a definition you'll end up with just about anywhere one can communicate on the internet, including email. If you take the very narrow approach of naming FB, IG, TikTok, etc., you almost certainly miss out on whatever the next platform is that's relevant to kids.
Remember YikYak? IIRC that was worse for kids than most of the big social media sites, but how do you write a law that anticipates the next YikYak without banning everything?
I don't think it really matters if the definition is too narrow as long as you ward off the worst threats. An easier way to classify them would be by size: any social network with over 1000 users should have to regulate their users. So as soon as something starts being relevant from a public safety perspective it'll fall under the law.
Let‘s ban social media altogether. In twenty years from now we will have found out that social media is more harmful than tobacco and alcohol combined.
A reason to be cautious about propositions like these isn't just the inherent belittling of children's right to information, which can be argued for or against in certain cases, but the aspect of giving any proceeding government the ability to ban a form of media from children due to their perception of toxicity, derangement, danger, et cetera.
The inherent belittling of children's right to the enjoyment of alcoholic drinks... Our current form of social media is a drug and it harms our children in all ways and adults too btw.
I don't buy it. The most relevant critique is see is that it's hard to control the age of your users without removing anonymous accounts thus limiting privacy.
Well, it's a hard problem but it doesn't feel impossible to solve.
To me there is no question that children should grow up protected from harmful substances. You don't want kids to smoke, scrolling algo feeds is not better. There is enough interesting internet out there without social media!
You're right, I didn't produce evidence in my comment. Smoking and lung cancer are more clear cut than social media problems in general.
The effects of social media are more complex and nuanced than smoking. There are a lot of studies that show that social media has a negative effect on mental well being. When someones dies of loneliness or birth rates collapse and young people have less sex than ever, social media is never the only cause and might not even be the main reason, but it seems to play an important role.
Also, I don't think all social media is bad. I do love these discussions on HN even or especially when we don't agree, but tiktok and similar services have a lot of bad incentives with regards to user well being.
As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15 (or some other number, higher or lower I don't care). I'm pretty sure they're worse than cigarettes for the future of humanity.
Agreed. Teachers are seeing the massive benefits from banning phones entirely during school hours. I think once we get data from bans for certain things like social media for kids, we'll all want to get on the wave.
Teachers are not good indicators of measuring 'benefits', as they are both the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body, they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be, and they are also grading the success - which all too often comes down to compliance.
That's why if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are diametral or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test. If control group with smartphones gets consistently less points by graders who do not know them or their smartphone habits as compared to those who live in digital exile, we can talk. Until then, 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study. For me, that's an indication that the outrage is pearl-clutching.
> they are... the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body
> 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
To clarify, do you think that phones or the removal of phones leads to these outcomes? Do you think that teachers like or dislike phones? Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?
> they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be
Some do. Are teachers the only ones?
> if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are [detrimental] or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test.... Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study.
I am not sure how you would set this up in a way that does not fall victim to a dozen confounding variables. There have been comparisons of standardized tests before and after phone bans, of course, but those also fall victim to similar statistical issues.
You also can't have double-blind study on something both the participant and teacher know is present or not.... But that doesn't mean the study is invalid, it just means you have to account for it.
That’s interesting, what if they don’t know it is an experiment or that any study is being done?
School A bans them, school B does not. None of the teachers know a study is being done.
This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
> This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand that their children have smartphones at school).
> Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
> And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
I think there is a difference though. There is the "off my lawn" crowd of "children today are so bad because..." sure, but I think they are not the ones demanding social media bans. The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
> So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
> The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
Do the stats prove that cell phones are the cause of the dire mental health indicators? Or at least that there is a correlation?
Some students even wish for a ban to reduce the pressure to keep up with social media.
That reminded me of Warren Buffet asking for his kind and to be taxed more.
By "his kind" you mean human beings?
Just the fuck you rich, I'm buying a football team for a laugh human beings. Not that Warren would necessarily buy a football team for laugh, but that "kind".
Billionaires aren't human.
The issue isn't that billionaires aren't human, the problem very much is that billionaires are regular petty spiteful human beings with poor judgement, impulse control, odd beliefs and an the utter lack of checks and balances that can be disregarded when a human has a billion and more.
NotAllBillionaires, sure .. but it only takes a few to screw over millions of other humans on a whim.
I agree with you.
Frankly, imho, billionaires shouldn't even exist. No one person can get that much wealth, that much power, that much influence, without losing their humanity, their decency. It's just not possible because the only way to accrue that much wealth is to do horrifically indecent things.
So, do I recognize what you're saying? Certainly. But I won't be shedding a tear of sympathy for them. I lose all sympathy for them when they step on the necks of everyday people to get where they are.
Lots of bending over backwards and appeals to authority to rationalize an emotional feeling of "This time is different."
Again, every generation thinks that.
This time might be different. But it's probably not.
> Again, every generation thinks that.
> This time might be different. But it's probably not.
And this is an appeal to tradition.
This article[1] from 2024 discusses this the studies on this topic. It seems to me the results are mixed, but conclusions range between social media being neutral to harmful. There is a lot in that article, so it's worth a read.
[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/728739
When appealing to the authority of academic studies, it's very important to be aware of the replication crisis for studies in the field of Psychology specifically, which is one of the worst offenders. Reproducibility has been found to be as low as 36% [1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project
That was not an appeal to the authority of academic papers so much as the OP trying to give context for the information that has informed their position.
Your responses have been an appeal to tradition (“every generation thinks that”), and a dismissal of the information because of the reproducibility crisis.
Ie you are arguing that we (humans) struggle with discerning Truth, and therefore we are wrong, and everything is fine.
But taking the negative position is just as epistemologically flawed. Hence the OPs attempt to discuss the best data we can find.
Letting people figure out cigarettes were bad for them took a very long time, and if social media is another form of addiction why not treat it how we treat other addictive products?
We could assume that this time is different and people, well children and minors specifically, will learn to avoid the addiction rather than banning them like alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.
This time might be different. But it's probably not.
Books, for instance. Some people will read for five hours without pausing, and they can use three or four books every week.
What is your point? I'm afraid I missed the point of your statement.
"but this time it's different" has also been a universal historical argument
>The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture.
Honestly you could just cut and paste the same arguments about jazz music in the 1920s or rock music in the later 20th century and they'd be indistinguishable. Just replace the mentions of jazz with social media topics and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether it was an article today or 100 years ago. "Health professionals" wringing hands about social media and jazz music in hilariously similar terms a century apart to a bunch of old people who are convinced the kids these days are going to shit because of the things they like to pay attention to.
https://daily.jstor.org/when-jazz-was-a-public-health-crisis...
Young people ARE SUPPOSED TO make poor decisions and be stressed out about it.
Middle aged people are supposed to clutch their pearls and wail about how this time it's different and truly awful (but what we did as kids was reasonable)
But all the middle aged people are wasting their lives on the junk information addiction train as well. It's not some generational divide.
It's like a parent telling their kid not smoke, while they are still addicted and smoking in the garden themselves.
> prohibition breeds desire
Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever.
My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
Me: "Umm. You'll find out. When you get to it."
>My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard and if you have the attitude that things aren't hard that tends to be true. Don't set your kid up for failure.
Many countries have the driving license at 16. In France it’s accompanied by a parent; in USA it’s the full driving license (I’ve learnt at 13 and never had an accident for 30 years). 16 is ok if you withstand peer pressure.
Insurance and actuarial science is some of the most data-drivenwork we have. It is incredibly hard to withstand peer pressure and there is not much wrong in admitting what the data has already proven.
It's not that hard to drive a car! Unfortunately, physics motivates us to have unreasonable expectations of our drivers, like "doesn't drive off the road at 100km/h ever", and "avoids all obstacles all of the time". That's the hard part.
It doesn't look to be that hard to be a dentist.
You drill a dark spot on tooth and put some resin inside to fill it up. /s
I did close to the same with my kids.. their PCs were in a common room, they got their first phone at 14 and it stayed at the downstairs charging station at night until 17. IMO it worked great and both our kids have a healthy relationship with their phones and tech in general.
I got my first smartphone at 23 (an HTC touch) and have an unhealthy relationship with my phone ;)
You’re lucky. Some kids do prefer the real world.
I'm not sure how I feel about making it illegal, but it does benefit from some sort of collective action.
If none of your child's friends and classmates have cell phones yet, I'd strongly encourage establishing a smartphone pact with the other parents. Our community used http://waituntil8th.org pledges but even a shared spreadsheet would work.
One of the things that seems necessary is to make it illegal for a kid to use a phone in class before a certain age.
If you don't have that you get the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards.
> the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards
True, but that's why you don't do it alone. You need to talk with other parents and encourage them to talk to others until the majority of parents understand the risks and let the administration, school board, and teachers know that they have your support.
All that local level stuff doesn’t work. As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone, the online world becomes vastly more interesting than the day to day.
> All that local level stuff doesn’t work
I can't speak to anyone else, but it seems to be working well enough in our town. The overwhelming majority of kids don't have cell phones until high school. That doesn't mean your kids won't beg you for a smartphone, it just means you can say "no" without socially isolating them.
> As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone
The point is to engage in collective action early enough that you can prevent these situations in the first place. Once a critical mass of kids have smartphones and their socialization and coordination moves to online spaces it becomes intensely isolating to be the only kid in a friend group without a smartphone.
Collective action that is effective is hard to pull off in a million homes a million times around the country. Most people without extra time and resources are just not going to do it which at this point is a large part of the country. It’s like advocating for town level collective action on alcohol or age of consent. It’s way more sensible to just make it law.
I fully agree. There should be a complete ban on social media and similar addictive platforms for those under 16, and a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users aged 16 to 18.
We basically give cigarettes to children.
My wife and I have this discussion on a regular basis. We want kids, but we've both had to navigate technology usage without any guide, and I've personally experienced how ruinous a smartphone can be.
We want to teach our children how to _responsibly_ use technology. We're still not sure what that looks like in detail, but the general agreement we've come to is something like 'no screens before age X'.
Or parents could just take responsibility for their own children and not buy them a phone instead of outsourcing their parental responsibilities to the government.
Those very responsible would likely do that. But then you have a spectrum from "fully responsible but on occasions slip" to "not responsible at all". You can help some make the "good" decision and prevent others from making "bad" decisions. Hopefully those who grew up with healthier environments will have higher chances for becoming "fully responsible".
It amazes me after seeing the corruption of the current government that people want to give it more power over our lives.
I would be pretty happy about social media being banned for everyone if not the immense possibilty for the government to abuse this law to disrupt undesired communication altogether.
What exactly do you mean by “social media”?
There are a lot of communities built around things like Discord and Telegram. IRC existed long before these.
There are many websites that allow you to post pictures and have other people comment on them. DeviantArt pre-dates the vast majority of modern apps.
There are also vast numbers of iterations on forums.
At what point should you prevent people from finding and talking to each other?
This website is social media.
Technically true but I've found it to be less addictive than other text forums (like the R-site and Lemmy), let alone the algo-powered video-based abominations that normies are all hooked on.
I'm thinking that it comes down to one thing in particular: the absence of response notifications. There's only so much addiction you can get out of a page of text without so much as a bell icon.
This is true, it's also not devoid of addictiveness :)
But you know what I mean, right? The ones using intricate algorithms and tracking to keep you "engaged" and manipulate what you read and see
I know what you mean, but I think the issue is not social media, but rather big corporations being shitty. PepsiCo makes addictive beverages that cause people develop to diabetes and heart disease, but that doesn't mean beverages should be illegal. I think it would be better to regulate or ban the specifically harmful things, rather than a blanket ban on something that is actually useful. And like you alluded to, banning social media could easily lead to a general crackdown on freedom of expression, journalism, etc, now that it is the primary way people communicate with one another.
I'll also add that I'm not specifically opposed to banning minors from using social media. It would probably also be better if it was illegal for children to buy their own soda tbh.
Far worse.
Denmark's government has authoritarian aims and are one of the primary groups pushing chat control in the EU. I think you are falling for the "think of the children..." fallacy here.
This is a stepping stone towards further control elsewhere, especially once a framework for enforcement is in place (which nobody actually thinks about when emotionally reacting to feel-good ideas like this). How easy would it be to expand ID based age enforcement to tracking ALL online activity and cracking down on "non-approved" speech? No thanks. I'll handle parenting myself.
Also, if you don't care about the age number, and think social media is just objectively bad...why are you on this social media site? Isn't posting here the definition of hypocrisy...given you're supporting what you believe to be worse than cigarettes?
"Old media" was (and is) quite heavily regulated. Not everywhere turned into an East German surveillance state.
The idea that governments are incapable of acting in the interests of their citizens is just a narrative designed to weaken public democratic institutions and hand power to the real authoritarians.
I don't think HN is a social media site. The goals of a social media site is to keep you engaged for as long as possible with the assistance of various algorithms, dark patterns while your data is sold to businesses so they can have a slice of your attention pie via ads and supported content.
I dont feel as if any of that applies here. In fact HN has gotten further from a social media site by not displaying comment points.
You can argue this, but if you hand over this authority to government, it will not be up to you.
Fundamentally this is an upvote driven social media platform no different from Reddit, which everyone agrees is social media.
If you live in Denmark, get ready to tie your State ID to your HN profile to login and hope that you don't say anything that would make the wrong official (or your employer) upset with you.
As we know from history, well-intentioned government laws have zero unintended consequences, always work perfectly every time, and are very easy to remove once they've been created...
How about you parent your kid instead of trying to get the government to parent everyone else's? What the hell is you and everyone else's problem who want to get into other families' business.
Disgusting intrusiveness and authoritianism.
It’s just easier to do some things if they’re prohibited by law. If you don’t want children to smoke, not selling them ciggarettes is a great first step.
All the statistics I’ve seen show that 25-30% of teenagers smoke weed.
It’s but the governments job to make you out not to be the bad guy to your kids.
Again, parent your kids. You clearly suck at it if you need the government to do it for you and you ruin society making it into an authoritian hellhole just because you have no backbone. Go live in an authoritian country where they ban everything instead of ruining what once where free countries.
Otherwise, don't have children if you lack the most basic of parenting skills.
Edit: you'd ask for bans on sex because you can't educate your children either, with the same line of reasoning. Religious like authoritianism.
1000% agree.
If you're a parent then act like one. You're perfectly able to enact that ban yourself - why do you need the governments help?
you can take a teen’s phone off them and they can just walk into a store and buy an inexpensive second hand handset and use the WiFi from a local cafe.
And if they do it with their own money, it's their phone.
Children prior to 18 are not subhuman. If you're old enough to buy your own phone, you're old enough to decide whether and how to use it.
The idea of treating under 18s like they are human is extremely undesirable in the USA because it among other things opens up a lot of doctors to be held accountable for their participation in the mass mutilation of baby boys. It also holds a whole lot of physically abusive parents to a standard where their children could call CPS and get their parents in legal trouble for corporal punishment.
Of course, these are indeed good things in worlds that don't endorse physical violence as the primary method to enforce control. This is why Finland his tail docking, ear cropping, animal crating, corporal punishment, circumcision, etc bans and why the US South is so ruthless.
This is unhinged.
Are you a parent?
You could make that exact same argument for alcohol, cigarettes, prescription medication - The reasons are the same.
And because of the laws, it has stopped children from smoking, drinking and abusing drugs. The entire war on drugs has been such a success.
Of course age laws have worked. Adults are the smokers, drinkers and drug abusers.
Do you want a situation with kids being drunk in school because they can just go to a shop during break and get a bottle of Vodka, no questions asked?
Really?
30%+ of teenagers smoke weed
https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/everything-you-and-your-...
Statistics for drinking
https://www.responsibility.org/alcohol-statistics/underage-d...
Even when I was in school in the 90s high schoolers were sneaking and smoking during school
To be fair, the "War on Tobacco" has actually been a huge success[1]. I've been saying for years that we should end the War on Drugs in its current form and extend tobacco policy to other drugs. If you're old enough to drink, smoke, and get shipped off to a warzone, who is anyone else to tell you that you don't deserve the freedom to buy a bottle of pharmaceutical-grade heroin at CVS and shoot it up in the privacy of your own home?
But because we collectively insist on infantilizing ourselves, hundreds of billions of dollars per year are redirected from the pharma industry to black market criminal syndicates. Instead of funding medical research and stock buybacks, we're actively choosing to fund global chaos and mass atrocities. We could stop tomorrow, and it would cost us nothing. In fact, it would save the US billions of dollars in annual losses at all levels of government and generate billions of dollars in annual tax revenue, all of which could be used to fund things like addiction treatment services, law enforcement, and border security.
1: https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/tobacco...
And it’s been replaced with more people smoking weed.
https://nida.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/2024/08/canna...
That's great to hear, although they really should prefer vaporization, sublingual administration, and edibles/potables to smoking.
Crazy to think how less government would need to act like a mom if there were one or two parents out there who were familiar with the word "no."
I, too, was a really great parent before having children.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-goes-viral-for-tweeting-fr...
> Dorothy, who runs an Ariana Grande fan account, was suffering through a typical teenage nightmare: Her mom took away her phone. But the resourceful teen didn't let that stop her from communicating with her followers. First, she started using Twitter on her Nintendo DS, a handheld video game device.
> Sometime after finding her DS, it was taken again, so Dorothy started tweeting from yet another connected device: her fridge. "My mom uses it to google recipes for baking so I just googled Twitter," she told CBS News.
That's the hacker spirit!
If you live in isolation, totally! We live in a civilization so we have to coordinate and compromise to get along.
Let's do away with the laws requiring shops to check ID before selling cigarettes. After all, a parent can simply tell their child not to smoke cigarettes and that's clearly good enough, right? All in the name of less government, which is clearly the most important priority here.
You make a persuasive case, but nicotine is genuinely addictive. Something to do with releasing stored glucose and substituting for food, and causing irritability on what I take to be a physiological level on withdrawal. Otherwise I'd agree.
But in this context, is it so important to distinguish between whether something is physiologically addictive vs. just seriously habit-forming? Except for substances where withdrawal is genuinely life-threatening, the practical difference seems to be in degree, not kind. Nicotine withdrawal causes irritability, but (I know having experienced both) so can breaking a bad social media habit.
(And it seems like there's a physiological basis to both cases, it's just that one involves endogenous chemicals and the other doesn't)
If all the other kids are on social media all the time, it makes it much harder to keep your kids off it. Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online? Would you want that for your kids?
Bans like this make much more sense at a community level. Not an individual level.
The idea that it's "hard" therefore we need government to save us is exactly why the program itself will never work. The problem is much deeper than law or government can fix.
You don’t need the government. Just some form of collective action.
I know of plenty of alternative communities & schools in which all the parents agreed to keep their kids away from phones until they were 15 or something. Great! If you try to roll something like this out to state schools, it looks like “the government”. But it’s the same idea.
I don’t understand the hatred and mistrust of government in this thread. The government protects us from lead in our food, from underage drug use, unsafe roads and lots of other stuff. Why not social media too?
> Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online?
I mean, who cares what the kid wants? It's your job as a parent to be a parent. Sometimes that means telling your kid no, even if that means they're not your best friend for a day or two.
> Would you want that for your kids?
Unequivocally, yes. Social media is cancer. I'd prefer my daughter not be pathologically depressed and my son not turn into a little hateball because of Meta's shitty algorithms. I have no idea why this is even a question, aside from the pure cowardice of Millennial parents.
None of this to comment on GP's suggestion that we don't need laws, or the idea that we shouldn't do this societally anyways.
Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level. This is terrible "we'll make it up on volume" logic.
It's also the justification used for some of the dumbest laws in history.
Think about what level of enforcement is going to be required for this (National IDs tied to online activity), and then think about the fact that Denmark is one of the main governments pushing chat control. Now start to think about how, once this tracking/enforcement scheme is created, that it might be expanded to things outside the scope of this law.
Like communism, this idea sounds good in theory, but is going to turn into an authoritarian nightmare in practice.
> Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level.
Social media itself doesn’t make sense at an individual level. If you’re the only one on a discord server, it’s not much of a party.
Personally I’m happy for some countries trying this. Let’s run the experiment and see how it goes. I too worry about the age verification system. Let’s see if the mental health of young people actually improves and by how much.
Rest assured, if the US couldn’t take collective action in the face of a global pandemic, there’s no way a law like this will come for America.
So... you don't have kids, I take it?
oh yeah, children famously do what their parents are told. especially when it comes to interacting with their friends. and they never are more adept at understanding technology and circumventing parental controls.
For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids. More importantly the constant appeal to the responsibility of parents misses that this is a collective action problem.
The reason most parents give up to regulate their children's online activity is because the children end up isolated if an individual household prevents their kid from socializing online. All the other kids are online, therefore switching individually ends in isolation. What might be beneficial for each household is unworkable as long as there is no collective mechanism. (which is the case for virtually every problem caused by social networks)
> For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids
This one hit me recently. My 4th grader has a friend who is on tik-toc and has a phone. Me, living in a bubble, where other parents I've met are terrified of social media and phones for their kids, was shocked when I met the mom and she wasn't aware of all the negative impact of social media. But, like with smokers, you can tell them it's bad for you but it's up to them to quit.
It's absolutely a collective action problem.
Except it's not so easy, because there's social pressure on the kids to use them to fit in with the group.
As a parent, you should be able to parent your child, rather than having the government arbitrarily and capriciously do so on your behalf, and for everyone else's kids, too.
As someone who got my first BlackBerry at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or led to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.
(Funny anecdote, but I didn't even figure out how to sign up for Facebook until I was 11-12, because I wouldn't lie about my age and it would tell me I was too young. Heh.)
First, if some parents let their kids use social media and some don't, all kids will eventually use it. You can't cut kids off from social spaces their peers are using and expect them to obey.
Second, this move by Denmark reflects a failure to regulate what social media companies have been doing to all their users.
e.g. What has Meta done to address their failures in Myanmar?[1] As little as was legally possible, and that was as close to nothing as makes no difference. More recently, Meta's own projections indicate 10% of their ad revenue comes from fraud[2]. The real proportion is almost certainly higher, but Meta refuses to take action.
Any attempts to tax or regulate American social media companies has invited swift and merciless response from the U.S. government. To make matters worse, U.S. law makes it impossible for American companies to respect the privacy of consumers in non-U.S. markets[3].
Put it all together, and American social media is something that children need to be protected from, but the only way to protect them is to cut them off from it entirely. This is the direct result of companies like Meta refusing to respond to concerns in any way other than lobbying the U.S. government to bully other nations into accepting their products as is.
Good on Denmark. I hope my own country follows suit.
------------
[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
[2]https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
[3]https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...
Cultures around the world have barred children from certain social places until they go through a rite of passage that the whole society, not just the parents, recognize.
Yes, cultures around the world have done this through parents parenting their child successfully, and not through arbitrary government overreach telling you how to parent.
Not really. The ideal you are describing, where there is no role for the community in regulating public spaces outside the household and determining when young people can enter them, strikes me as highly unusual historically and geographically. It’s an example of that streak of libertarianism that took off from early American internet culture and hardly exists outside internet pontificating.
Social media in the early 2000s is nothing like today.
You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry—appropriate timing for a government to make a law to save kids from the evils of it.
> You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry
You're either operating with an anachronistic notion of what constitutes social media, or you're very out of touch with the public. Not sure which one.
The "myspaces" and "facebooks" are trending down, but other forms of social media like tiktok, discord, reddit, youtube, etc are alive and well, still hooking kids young as they always have.
i think the ban on youtube accounts will just be mildly inconvenient, like not being able to subscribe to channels, or chat in a livestream. they can't ban just watching youtube without an account.
The issue is rather the algorithmic feed optimized for grabbing our attention. It's definitely addictive and should be regulated like other drugs.
Give people technology, but let's have an honest conversation about it finally. As a adult it's already hard to muster enough self control to not keep scrolling.
Okay, so explain this to your child, just like you tell them they shouldn't do drugs. Are there not people who are sober by choice? The only thing preventing you from going and smoking crack right now is most certainly not because it's illegal, but because you make a choice not to do so, knowing the negative effects it has on you.
I don't scroll social media. When I was 14-17, sure. But then I lost interest, much like most of my peers did.
(I do probably refresh HN more than I should though, but I think that's probably the least evil thing I could do compulsively...)
The part you’re missing is that the decision to be online isn’t like choosing to do drugs. It’s closer to deciding to go to parties and socialise at all.
Social media for teens is ubiquitous and where your peers connect. It’s being included in your social group, not opt-in thrill seeking.
Most teens will have multiple accounts for various networks - private accounts for their friends, and then again for closer friends. Or they use apps like Discord that parents have no visibility into at all. There is a lot that most parents never see.
For better or worse.
Over what time scale are you suggesting that social media is dying?
I don't think it will ever disappear, but it certainly plays a less outsized role now than it used to, and it's not exactly an industry I see huge growth in.
What we define as "social media" I think is important. I don't really consider things like TikTok to be "social media" even if there is both a social component and a media component, since the social part is much smaller in comparison to the media part. People aren't communicating on TikTok (I think), which is what people concerned about "being left out by their peers" would be referring to. This type of "social" media probably is not dying, but I think is likely stagnant or will become stagnant in growth, while traditional "social media" continues to regress over the next decade.
Yeh, no.
Parents are doing what they can, but it inevitably comes down to “but my friend x has it so why can’t I have it” - so all and any help from government / schools is a good thing.
This is so, so, so obviously a nasty, dangerous technology - young brains should absolutely not be exposed to it. In all honesty, neither should older ones, but that’s not what we’re considering here.
"Because I'm your parent, and I said no."
Do you buy your kids a toy every time you go to the store? Do you feed them candy for dinner?
Neither of those examples result in social ostracism from peers.
I think you are massively overstating how important it is to the kids that they have a social media account. How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?
With respect, you’re very out of touch.
Connecting online is the primary social space for many kids nowadays, not in person.
Some parents (or those without kids) have a bit of a naive view and think ‘social media’ and just imagine Facebook, instagram etc - things they understand and that don’t provide much connection.
The kids connect using private accounts, completely different apps, or even just inside the chat of other apps like games, if that is where your specific group hangs out.
I agree with what you're saying (including saying that arcfour is out of touch and doesn't really know what they're talking about), but... I do agree with them to an extent. And I have a kid (with another along the way). Kids adapt. They want to be on social media, or games, or Discord, or whatever because their friends are. If they have enough friends in real life doing something fun, that becomes where their specific group hangs out. The number of people you need in that group before it crosses that threshold is really low... 4, 5 people? That's all you need to have a tight knit friend group.
I've seen things like after school D&D club at the elementary school down the street where my son now goes to preschool. I'm optimistic that by the time he's older, there will be even more groups like this and more opportunities for him to have friends where they're doing activities that aren't mediated by screens.
To be clear, I'm not weighing on in on whether or not I think a ban is a good idea. I tend to think it is. But I do think the idea that there's nothing parents can do from the ground up without the help of government (which I'm not opposed to!) is also a bit misguided.
With all due respect, I suspect you don’t have teen kids. Almost their entire social life is organised online.
I don't, but I do have friends, and did have friends when I was a kid growing up during the rise and proliferation of social media and the beginnings of algorithmic content distribution, so I am familiar with it.
> How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?
Easy. If half the conversation happens online, and your kid wasn’t part of that, they’d constantly need to be “filled in” when they got to school.
Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it. You could still go to all the meetings, but there would have been conversations held and decisions made that you wouldn’t even know about. You would feel like you were on the out. Banning an individual kid from social media would be just the same.
> Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it.
Ah, bliss...
The problem is the kid feeling left out at school when they're the only one without a smartphone and can't participate in their friends' activities.
...and this needs to be solved with a law? Kids feeling left out over something well and truly inconsequentual?
Not necessarily a law, but it requires some form of collective action.
I highly recommend discussing a smartphone pact such as http://waituntil8th.org with fellow parents before anyone in their friend group gets a cell phone.
Who needs laws! Let's also let them all smoke cigarettes too then while we're at it.
Lol you can order a cigar or pipe tobacco on the internet completely legally without any ID check. Most people don't know this. You can do it with wine, too, for the vast majority of the US. It's not really a problem.
I suspect you need a credit card though? Can kids sign credit card contracts without parent consent in the US?
Moreover just because that laws and regulations are applied inconsistently in the US (and we are talking about Denmark here), does not mean we should completely do away with them.
Not sure if it's changed but I had a debit card and bank account from age 15 when I started working as a kid. I got it without even involving my parents, not sure if you can still do that now, it was before the KYC stuff ramped up to the nines.
Comparing the internet we grew up with and the modern internet where a army of psychologists have been unleashed with the express intent to massively increase addiction to everything they touch is very foolish
Demanding a law because you are unable to tell your kids "no" makes you the bigger fool.
This is not about telling kids no. This is about companies (and foreign hostile governments!) worth billions of dollars openly studying how best to prey on children's minds. There are things that are just poisonous to society as a concept.
You gonna at least gesture at one of these Cognitohazards that are so poisonous we can't even discuss them? Because I admit to being curious!
The same people demanding the anti-smart phone laws will rat your ass out the second your kid is spotted walking alone, playing independently, etc. They want to put you in a catch-22 situation.
The real problem here is way less people are parents or people that have no idea what parenting is like, so they don't understand the practicalities of raising children so they come up with the dumbest laws possible and then lord it over you with the full weigh of the state so they can pretend to be parents but with none of the responsibility and all of the smug moral superiority.
Jonathan Haidt, the most prominent psychologist pushing for restrictions on social media use for children, is also the most prominent proponent of letting kids play and roam more freely. So no, those are not the same people.
The people doing that are themselves victims of social media and news fear mongering and engagement maxxing
As someone who sold their first joint at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or let to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.
/s
Absolute statements like yours rarely work, because the discussion is hardly ever about absolutes and more about where to draw the line.
It'll be interesting to see what they can cook up at home. Chat Control was pushed in large part by Denmark, and Minister of Justice Peter Hummelgaard is on record saying some pretty disturbing things regarding the right to privacy online.[1] Now for this, they don't need the entire EU to go along, and any laws already on the books might prove ineffective to protect against means that end up achieving similar goals to Chat Control.
Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph, as well as letters.[2] Turns out online messaging doesn't count. It'd be a funny one to get to whatever court, because hopefully someone there will have a brain and use it, but it wouldn't be the first time someone didn't.
[1] https://boingboing.net/2025/09/15/danish-justice-minister-we...
[2] https://www.grundloven.dk/
Whether internet is covered by § 72 seems undetermined; as far as I can tell the Supreme Court hasn't made a decision on it; but considering that it considered fake SMS train tickets to be document fraud, even though the law text never explicitly mentions text messages: it seems clear that internet communication ought to be covered, if challenged.
Regardless, this wouldn't run afoul of this. This is similar to restricting who can buy alcohol, based purely on age; the identification process is just digital. MitID - the Danish digital identification infrastructure - allows an service to request specific details about another purpose; such as their age or just a boolean value whether they are old enough. Essentially: the service can ask "is this user 18 or older?" and the ID service can respond yes or no, without providing any other PII.
That's the theory at least; nothing about snooping private communication, but rather forcing the "bouncer" to actually check IDs.
> Regardless, this wouldn't run afoul of this. This is similar to restricting who can buy alcohol, based purely on age; the identification process is just digital. MitID - the Danish digital identification infrastructure - allows an service to request specific details about another purpose; such as their age or just a boolean value whether they are old enough. Essentially: the service can ask "is this user 18 or older?" and the ID service can respond yes or no, without providing any other PII.
> That's the theory at least; nothing about snooping private communication, but rather forcing the "bouncing" to actually check IDs.
Hopefully the theory will reflect the real world. The 'return bool' to 'isUser15+()' is probably the best we can hope for, and should prevent the obvious problems, but there can always be more shady dealings on the backend (as if there aren't enough of those already).
Given the track record of digitalization in Denmark, you can be rest assured this will be implemented in the worst possible way.
This is Denmark. The country who reads the EU legislation requesting the construction of a CA to avoid centralizing the system and then legally bends the rules of EU and decides it's far better to create a centralized solution. I.e., the intent is a public key cryptosystem with three bodies, the state being the CA. But no, they should hold both the CA and the Key in escrow. Oh, and then decides that the secret should be a pin such that law enforcement can break it in 10 milliseconds.
I think internet verification is at least 10 years too late. Better late than never. I just lament the fact we are going to get a bad solution to the problem.
>considering that it considered fake SMS train tickets to be document fraud, even though the law text never explicitly mentions text messages
That has nothing to do with the medium of the ticket and is all about knowingly presenting a fake ticket. The ticket is a document proving your payment for travel. They could be lumps of dirt and it would still be document fraud to present a fake hand of dirt.
Except the Supreme Court deemed the case to be of a principal nature, and granted relieve (i.e. no cost to either party), since it was disputed whether a fake SMS train ticket counted as document fraud.
> Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph
That's very much not how danish law works. The specific paragraph says "hvor ingen lov hjemler en særegen undtaglse, alene ske efter en retskendelse." translated as "where no other law grants a special exemption, only happen with a warrant". That is, you can open peoples private mail and enter their private residence, but you have to ask a judge first.
People continue to believe that the "Grundlov" works like the US constitution, and it's really nothing like that. If anything it's more of a transfer of legislation from the king to parliament. Most laws just leaves the details to be determined by parliament.
Censorship really is one of the few laws that are pretty unambiguous, that's really just "No, never again". Not that this stops politicians, but that's a separate debate.
And yet they wanted to push a proposal where the government would have free access to all digital communication, no judge required. So if it happens through a telephone conversation, you need a judge, while with a digital message, you wouldn't have, since the government would have already collected that information through Chat Control.
The ombudsman will say some strong words and everything will continue as is.
I don't know where you get your information, but that was not in the chat control proposal I read.
Patrick Breyer has some good thoughts on this.[1]
The relevant points I believe to be:
> All citizens are placed under suspicion, without cause, of possibly having committed a crime. Text and photo filters monitor all messages, without exception. No judge is required to order to such monitoring – contrary to the analog world which guarantees the privacy of correspondence and the confidentiality of written communications.
And:
> The confidentiality of private electronic correspondence is being sacrificed. Users of messenger, chat and e-mail services risk having their private messages read and analyzed. Sensitive photos and text content could be forwarded to unknown entities worldwide and can fall into the wrong hands.
[1] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
> All citizens are placed under suspicion
> No judge is required to order to such monitoring
That sounds quite extreme, I just can't square that with what I can actually read in the proposal.
> the power to request the competent judicial authority of the Member State that designated it or another independent administrative authority of that Member State
It explicitly states otherwise. A judge (or other independent authority) has to be involved. It just sounds like baseless fear mongering (or worse, libertarianism) to me.
Didn't the proposal involve automated scanning of all instant messages? How isn't that equivalent of having an automated system opening every letter and listening to every phone call looking for crimes?
Not from what I can tell. From what I can read, it only establishes a new authority, under the supervision and at the digression, of the Member state that can, with judicial approval mandate "the least intrusive in terms of the impact on the users’ rights to private and family life" detection activities on platforms where "there is evidence [... ] it is likely, [...] that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material".
That all sounds extremely boring and political, but the essence is that it mandates a local authority to scan messages on platforms that are likely to contain child pornography. That's not a blanket scan of all messages everywhere.
> platforms that are likely to contain child pornography
So every platform, everywhere? Facebook and Twitter/X still have problems keeping up with this, Matrix constantly has to block rooms from the public directory, Mastodon mods have plenty of horror stories. Any platform with UGC will face this issue, but it’s not a good reason to compromise E2EE or mandate intrusive scanning of private messages.
I would not be so opposed to mandated scans of public posts on large platforms, as image floods are still a somewhat common form of harassment (though not as common as it once was).
The proposal is about deploying automated scanning of every message and every image on all messaging providers and email client. That is indisputable.
It therefore breaks EtoE as it intercepts the messages on your device and sends them off to whatever 3rd party they are planning to use before those are encrypted and sent to the recipient.
> It explicitly states otherwise. A judge (or other independent authority) has to be involved. It just sounds like baseless fear mongering (or worse, libertarianism) to me.
How can a judge be involved when we are talking about scanning hundreds of millions if not billions of messages each day? That does not make any sense.
I suggest you re-read the Chat control proposal because I believe you are mistaken if you think that a judge is involved in this process.
> That is indisputable.
I dispute that. The proposal explicitly states it has to be true that "it is likely, despite any mitigation measures that the provider may have taken or will take, that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material;"
> How can a judge be involved
Because the proposal does not itself require any scanning. It requires Member states to construct an authority that can then mandate the scanning, in collaboration with a judge.
I suggest YOU read the proposal, at least once.
You must be trolling.
> it is likely, despite any mitigation measures that the provider may have taken or will take, that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material
That is an absolute vague definition that basically encompasses all services available today including messaging providers, email providers and so on. Anything can be used to send pictures these days. So therefore anything can be targeted, ergo it is a complete breach of privacy.
> Because the proposal does not itself require any scanning. It requires Member states to construct an authority that can then mandate the scanning, in collaboration with a judge.
Your assertion makes no sense. The only way to know if a message contains something inappropriate is to scan it before it is encrypted. Therefore all messages have to be scanned to know if something inappropriate is in it.
A judge, if necessary, would only be participating in this whole charade at the end of the process not when the scanning happens.
This is taken verbatim from the proposal that you can find here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20...
> [...] By introducing an obligation for providers to detect, report, block and remove child sexual abuse material from their services, .....
It is an obligation to scan not a choice based some someone's opinion like a judge, ergo no one is involved at all in the scanning process. There is no due process in this process and everyone is under surveillance.
> [...] The EU Centre should work closely with Europol. It will receive the reports from providers, check them to avoid reporting obvious false positives and forward them to Europol as well as to national law enforcement authorities.
Again here no judge involved. The scanning is automated and happens automatically for everyone. Reports will be forwarded automatically.
> [...] only take steps to identify any user in case potential online child sexual abuse is detected
To identify a user who may or may not have shared something inappropriate, that means that they know who the sender is, who the recipient was , what bthe essage contained and when it happened. Therefore it s a complete bypass of EtoE.
This is the same exact thing that we are seeing know with the age requirements for social media. If you want to ban kids who are 16 years old and under then you need to scan everyone's ID in order to know how old everyone is so that you can stop them from using the service.
With scanning, it is exactly the same. If you want to prevent the dissemination of CSAM material on a platform, then you have to know what is in each and every message so that you can detect it and report it as described in my quotes above.
Therefore it means that everyone's messages will be scanned either by the services themselves or this task will be outsourced to a 3rd party business who will be in charge of scanning, cataloging and reporting their finding to the authorities. Either way the scanning will happen.
I am not sure how you can argue that this is not the case. Hundreds of security researchers have spent the better part of the last 3 years warning against such a proposal, are you so sure about yourself that you think they are all wrong?
> This is taken verbatim from the proposal that you can find here
You're taking quotes from the preamble which are not legislation. If you scroll down a little you'll find the actual text of the proposal which reads:
> The Coordinating Authority of establishment shall have the power to request the competent judicial authority of the Member State that designated it or another independent administrative authority of that Member State to issue a detection order
You see, a judge, required for a detection order to be issued. That's how the judge will be involved BEFORE detection. The authority cannot demand detection without the judge approving it.
I really dislike you way of arguing. I thought it was important to correct your misconceptions, but I do not believe you to be arguing in good faith.
Let me address your points here and to make it more explicit, let me use Meta/Facebook Messenger as an example.
> You see, a judge, required for a detection order to be issued. That's how the judge will be involved BEFORE detection. The authority cannot demand detection without the judge approving it.
Your interpretation of the judge's role is incorrect. The issue is not if a judge is involved, but what that judge is authorizing.
You are describing a targeted warrant. This proposal creates a general mandate.
Here is the the reality of the detection orders outlined by this proposal:
1: A judicial authority, based on a risk assessment, does not issue a warrant for a specific user John Doe who may be committing a crime. 2: Instead, it issues a detection order to Meta mandating that the service Messenger must be scanned for illegal content. 3: This order legally forces Meta to scan the data from all users on Messenger to find CSAM. It is a blanket mandate, not a targeted one.
This forces Facebook to implement a system to scan every single piece of data that goes through them, even if it means scanning messages before they are encrypted. Meta has now a mandate to scan everyone, all the time, forever.
Your flawed understanding is based on a traditional wiretap.
Traditional Warrant (Your View): Cops suspect Tony Soprano. They get a judge's approval for a single, time-limited wiretap on Tony's specific phone line in his house based on probable cause.
Detection Order: Cops suspect Tony “might” use his house for criminal activity. They get a judge to designate the entire house a "high-risk location." The judge then issues an order compelling the homebuilder to install 24/7 microphones in every room to record and scan all conversations from everyone (Tony, his family, his guests, his kids and so on) indefinitely.
That is the difference that I think you are not grasping here.
With E2E, Meta cannot know if CSAM is being exchanged in a message unless it can see the plain text.
To comply with this proposal, Meta will be forced to build a system that bypasses their own encryption. There is no other way.
This view is shared by security experts, privacy organizations, and legal experts.
You can read this opinion letter from a former ECJ judge who completely disagrees with your view here:
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Vaj...
I am sorry if you think that I am arguing in bad faith. I am not.
While there is nothing I can do to make you like my arguing style, just know that I am simply trying to make you understand your misconceptions about this law.
> Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph, as well as letters
And this is why laws should always include their justification.
The intent was clearly to protect people - to make sure the balance of power does not fall too much in the government's favor that it can silence dissent before it gets organized enough to remove the government (whether legally or illegally does not matter), even if that meant some crimes go unpunished.
These rules were created because most current democratic governments were created by people overthrowing previous dictatorships (whether a dictator calls himself king, president or general secretary does not matter) and they knew very well that even the government they create might need to be overthrown in the future.
Now the governments are intentionally sidestepping these rules because:
- Every organization's primary goal is its own continued existence.
- Every organization's secondary goal is the protection of its members.
- Any officially stated goals are tertiary.
Banning personalised ads would solve a lot of the underlying incentives that drives the attention grabbing economy today.
Increasing the age a few years for when young people are allow to make accounts on social media is not going to make a large difference in the big picture of things, and do not address the core problem that is the collection and abuse of massive amounts of personal data.
Upping the age limit a few years is a compromise that big tech can live with. Here in Norway, we've had a 13 year limit for years, but most parents have not cared so far and help their kids register at a much earlier age anyway. This is changing though, as more people realise the downsides of addictive and manipulative apps fighting desperately for our data and attention.
It is frustrating to see how unwilling we are to address the economic incentives that causes the biggest harms.
> Banning personalised ads
I'm in favour of anything that tries to address the appaling effects of social media, but as long as there is advertising that will, surely, be some sort of personalisation. In the past you bought a magazine about, say, gardening, and all the ads were about gardening. The advertisers were betting that most people reading a gardening magazine were interested in gardening products, the ads were, to some degree, personalised.
If online 'personalised' ads were banned how would personalised be defined ?
If the goal is simply to make social media unprofitable, you can just be really brutal and require that all users from a language region visiting a website (or using an App) must be delivered the exact same set of ads.
The fact that most advertisers would flock to promoting on smaller special websites/apps (equivalent to your gardening magazine), is exactly the side-effect we want. The shift in spending will hopefully lead to the current "massive social media platform" model will dying out, and boosting smaller independent platforms.
Seems like an attempt to enforce government ID identification and destroy online anonymity to «protect the children», the very same way it's been done in Britain.
And Australia.
How will they achieve that without introducing a requirement to identify yourself on every online platform, which some would say is probably the whole reason for introducing something promoted as being "for the children"™.
With digital ID. They are releasing it in a couple of months.
https://digst.dk/it-loesninger/den-digitale-identitetstegneb...
I look forward to being able to buy your porn surfing habits on the darkweb in a few years.
The ID card allows age verification without disclosing the identity to the service which needs the age verified.
You don't think that the digital ID provider is keeping logs of which sites requested to verify which users? Even government websites are not exactly known for their high security.
The digital ID provider is only involved in issuing the ID to you. When you use that ID to verify age to a site the only communication is between your phone and the site. The ID provider has no idea when you use the ID, how often you use the ID, or where you use the ID.
Briefly, when the ID provider issues the ID it gets cryptographically bound to your phone. When you use the ID to prove something to a site (age, citizenship, etc) the is done by using a zero-knowledge proof based protocol that allows your phone to prove to the site (1) that you have an ID issued by your ID provider, (2) that ID is bound to your phone, (3) the phone is unlocked, and (4) the thing you are claiming (age, citizenship, etc) matches what the ID says. This protocol does not convey any other information from or about your ID to the site.
I don't know, this is a bad take. There is good technology to deal with that problem.
https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457390
*everyone's
The difference is meaningful. It's mostly prisoners dilemma. If only one persons porn habit is available thats bad for them. If everyones (legal) porn habits are available, then it gets normalized.
this seems to run parallel to the "i have nothing to hide" / "well they have everyone's data, so who cares about mine" arguments.
this is too narrow a view on the issue. the problem isn't that a colleague, acquaintance, neighbor, or government employee is going to snoop through your data. the problem is that once any government has everyone's data, they will feed it to PRISM-esque systems and use it to accurately model the population, granting the power to predict and shape future events.
Normalized or not, the risk is you get something akin US drug enforcement: ignored for certain demographics, enforced for others. The ability to see someone's porn history is irrelevant until a government (or employer perhaps) wants to weaponize it.
The problem isn't my peers, it's the people in power and how many of them lack any scruples.
Would social networks accepting Danish users have to implement the other end of that, or will they also be allowed to use less privacy-oriented age verification solutions (e.g. requesting a photocopy of the user's ID)?
It seems to me like it's either a privacy disaster waiting to happen (if not required) or everyone but the biggest players throwing out a lot of bathwater with very little baby by simply not accepting Danish users (if required).
The wording on the page also makes it sound like their threat model doesn't include themselves as a potential threat actor. I absolutely wouldn't want to reveal my complete identity to just anyone requesting it, which the digital ID solution seems to have covered, but I also don't want the issuer of the age attestation to know anything about my browsing habits, which the description doesn't address.
> everyone but the biggest players throwing out a lot of bathwater with very little baby by simply not accepting Danish users (if required).
The biggest players in social media are precisely the ones that this law is targeting.
No one in charge of implementing this law is going to care whether some Mastodon server implements a special auth solution for Danish users or not, they are going to care that Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc. do so.
this scenario can be addressed without digital ID
the social media platforms already measure more than enough signals to understand a users likely age. they could be required by law to do something about it
It would be a lot simpler to only sell standard devices to adults. Kids should be using devices with curated access to specific tools and platforms meant for children.
In the US they'd just make the platforms massively liable and let them worry about how to enforce. No idea what they'll do in another country.
we get to see how it works in australia next month. there's already stories of kids putting on fake mustaches to fool age-of-face recognition, which is one of the methods used.
i think it'll get to: "these methods aren't good enough, we'll have to enforce digital id".
Do they make parents liable or no? I'm somewhat curious about that as an option.
Given all the information companies have about users on social media, do you really believe they can't guess the real age?
Some people: these online companies have too much information about us! They know everything about us!! Where's muh privacy??
Same people now: how will the poor company know that it's an underage user?? Oh noes!
Child abuse is already illegal, the law needs to be expanded to cover these new forms of harm to children. It seems reasonable that I am held criminally accountable if I expose my child to harmful Internet content like social media.
the EU is working on a system for age verification that won't identify you to the platform. The details are of course complicated, but you can imagine an openid like system run by the government that only exposes if you're old enough for Y.
The platforms asks your government if you're old enough. You identify yourself to your government. Your government responds to the question with a single Boolean.
Our German national ID supports just verifying that you are over age X, with no other info given.
But why would you give your id?
You don't need to, that's the thing. The site requests "are you over 18" and you use your ID to prove it without them getting any other information from it. Requires a phone with NFC, but the app is open source
hopefully the protocol is open source too. I'd hate to find that it just works on iOS and Google certified Android.
Should all be open, but I don't know for sure. Works with ungoogled android unless something changed.
https://github.com/Governikus/AusweisApp
That's very cool and good to hear. Thanks for sharing!
I think that ends up being a more difficult problem than just open source. There will have to be some cryptography at play to make sure the age verification information is actually attested by your government.
It would be possible for them to provide an open-source app, but design the cryptography in such a way that you couldn't deploy it anyway. That would make it rather pointless.
I too hope they design that into the system, which the danish authorities unfortunately don't have a good track record of doing.
And the reference implementation requires google play integrity attestation so you are forced to use a google approved device with google approved firmware and a google account to download the application in order to participate. Once this becomes implemented, you are no longer a citizen of the EU but a citizen of Google or Apple and a customer of the EU:
Quick google (on my phone, so not certain) says it works with microg as of August
Yeah, sorry I mixed up the old German Ausweisapp and the euID Reference App
How does the site verify that the ID being used for verification is the ID of the person that is actually using the account? How does the site verify that a valid ID was used at all?
If the app is open source, what stops someone from modifying it to always claim the user is over 18 without an ID?
Not that I understand it, but AFAIK that's cryptography doing it's thing.
And using someone else's Id and password is the same as every method of auth
It needs to be scaled to the EU level.
*Only for Google Android and Apple iOS users. Everyone else who don't want to be a customer of these two, including GrapheneOS and LineageOS users, will have to upload scans of identity papers to each service, like the UK clusterfuck.
Source: I wrote Digitaliseringsstyrelsen in Denmark where this solution will be implemented next year as a pilot, and they confirm that the truly anonymous solution will not be offered on other platforms.
Digitaliseringsstyrelsen and EU is truly, utterly fucking us all over by locking us in to the trusted competing platforms offered by the current American duopoly on the smartphone market.
This sounds like a temporary issue.
> This sounds like a temporary issue.
There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
This is an acceptable solution only if the government doesn't know which platform you are trying to access either.
It sounds extreme, but I support banning usage of anything that runs software for children under 13. Under 13, children are still developing their minds, it is important for their welfare that they learn how to function without technological dependencies.
You know how in school they used to tell us we can't use calculators to solve math problems? Same thing. It can't be done by individual parents either, because then kids would get envious and that in itself would cause more problems than it would solve.
It is important for kids to get bored, to socialize in person, to solve problems the hard way, and develop the mental-muscles they need to not only function, but to make best use of modern technology.
It is also important that parents don't use technology to raise their children (includes TV). Most parents just give their kids a tablet with youtube these days.
This is very extreme take. I learned to program at age 10. It is an amazing tool for mind development. Had to invent sine and cosine tables to make my computer games, before even encountering the concept at school.
Is that survivor's bias? there are many other mental development goals chidren should have. for the very small number of children that will learn to program at that age, there is no harm in delaying it a few years, but for the vast majority whose development would be stunted, or worse, they'll be harmed.
Some kids learn to drink and smoke at a that age too, and many turn out ok.
same and about the same age. however, completely different times. I thought about this a lot and have safely concluded that if I was 9-10 years old now programming would quickly turn into gaming and doom scrolling and … given a choice now of not being exposed to it at same age or nothing until say HS I would choose the latter
Speaking as someone in their 20s - no, I don't think it's a "completely different time". Just 10 years ago, I first learned programming from scripting languages; SourcePawn from Team Fortress 2, and Lua from Roblox/GMod. Predators, hive minds, and self-destructing behavior from children wasn't suddenly invented or rejuvenated after 2016.
All 3 were a total hotbed of bad influences for a child: Team Fortress had trade pub servers with people doing sprays of literal CP and wearing custom lewd skins to harass users with them - and people with very questionable social skills and intentions huddled up in realtime microphone comms with children, Roblox's predator problem for the last 14+ years (at least that I can attest) is suddenly en vogue now that they're a public company and there's stock shorting to be had, GMod is still the community with the most colorful vocabulary I've ever encountered - plus grooming. And much more.
Indeed, you can (and I did) get burned by these actualities when exposed to such communities in your youth - and it can cost you real money, real time, real idealism/innocence, and real mental health. However, I think being exposed to softwares, systems and games that inspired curiosity and led me toward a path of WANTING to contribute brought me to this software development career and life path, and it would have been much more inaccessible and unknown to me in any other way. And I favorited a comment from another HN user a few days ago that goes in astute depth on why that path can only be organically introduced and self-governed [1].
I referred to these places earlier in my comment as "bad influences". I think the single-most powerful thing a parent can do tasked with this dilemma - especially during an upbringing in systemically hard, uncertain, and turbulent times - is teaching them how to identify, avoid, and confront bad influences. Equipped with that, and knowing how to handle yourself, is of utmost importance.
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45718773
I was learning to program at age 11. This does indeed sound extreme.
Would it have made a big difference if you learned to code at 13? Is there a pressing need as to why kids need to code at a young age? Maybe there could be exceptions for children that develop sooner? If your other developmental metrics were met early on, I don't see why an earlier age would be a problem.
I don't know, maybe? Maybe it's not up to the state to decide whether my kids developmental metrics allows them screen time before age 13? What kind of nanny state is that?
I don't think that's a nanny state. you can't give your kid alcohol for example at that age, let them drive, get married (don't get me started on some countries!), operate a chainsaw or other dangerous machinery.
This is a danger to their mental development. Look at teacher forums all over. r/Teachers on reddit should be illuminating. Tech and parents sticking devices to their kids instead of raising them properly has resulted in utter disaster. If there was no harm imposed on children, I would agree that it is a nanny-state thing.
> Would it have made a big difference if you learned X at 13?
Yes. Kids getting access to knowledge that clicks with them earlier than later makes a huge difference.
Which is exactly why so many people are rushing in to control what kids get exposed to. You seem to have pretty strong thought on the issue yourself, if you agree on the possible negative impact, you can't also deny the possibility of positive impact.
The dose makes the poison, I think we can understand how extreme position tend to bring more negative than positive consequences, regardless of the rethoric.
[edit: rephrased the last part]
I strongly suspect the network connection is the issue, not the software. Let the kids have graphing calculators!
I generally agree. But so much software today is useless without a network connection. Online help (anybody remember those chm files?) was often very very good, because it was supposed to be _the_ documentation for most software.
I was programming age 5 in BASIC. Raspberry Pis are the modern equivalent and I think every child should have one.
> they learn how to function without technological dependencies.
So like the Amish? Or are they still too technologically dependent and children need to be banned from pulleys, fulcrums, wheels, etc.?
I don't know much about the Amish, so I can't comment.
Teaching kids how to code isn't all that meaningful on its own. knowing what to do once you learn how to code is. If your plan is to teach your kid how to code, teach them to solve problems without code at that age. Unless you're serious about thinking learning at age 5 vs age 13 would make a big difference.
I think every kid 13 and above should have an rpi too.
I think you're missing the point. 5 year old me was writing their own computer games and at no point did I need or ask my parents how to do it (though they did buy the computer; thanks mum and dad!), they didn't know.
There were a plethora of books in the library on how to program, and here you are suggesting I, and everyone like me, be banned from doing so. You'd probably also ban me from the library by assuming I couldn't read aged 5. I certainly could, especially computer manuals. The computer was an amazing thing which did exactly what I told it, and I learned quickly how precise I needed to tell it, and when I made a mistake, it repeated my mistakes over and over without noticing. I learned more about digital ethics age 5 trying to write games than the typical CEO learns going on a "Do Not Create The Torment Nexus" course.
You'd insist I not be allowed to even use software, let alone write my own. You'd be actively cutting off my future professional life, and depriving entire nations of bedroom programmers cum professional software engineers, with your ill-thought-out ban.
If your children show an aptitude or a fascination for a topic, I hope you feed that and praise them for it.
I think books are great, provided they're age appropriate.
First, my proposal is a delay, not a ban. This is such a good idea, that a lot of FAANG CEO's are doing this for their kids welfare (more or less) already.
I think the overall welfare of kids should be weighed against the benefits.
I think you should have been learning to tinker with electronics, solve math algorithms and develop all kinds of curiosities. the future of being a programmer involves competing with LLMs, you have to be good at knowing what to program. Humans aren't needed when it comes to simply knowing how to write code.
I acknowledge that there will be exceptions, and perhaps that should be considered. but also lookup terms like "ipad babies" and how gen-alpha is turning out. Most parents don't teach their kids how to code in basic. and content regulation for kids is futile, unless you want the government monitoring your devices "for the children's sake".
> If your children show an aptitude or a fascination for a topic, I hope you feed that and praise them for it.
Same, but I hope you let them learn things in the right order and consider their overall long term wellbeing instead of temporary satisfaction. Children did fine without computers for all of humanity's history. the nature of children hasn't changed in the past 3 decades. What you consider feeding might actually be stagnating. If there is a good and practical way to make sure that children are developed well enough to interact with computers, and we can also make sure that the content they consume is age-appropriate without implementing a dystopian surveillance state, i'm all for it.
But pretending the problem doesn't exist, and letting 99% of children suffer because 1% of kids might learn BASIC doesn't sound like a good plan.
I think a better distinction is internet enabled software.
I had a good time programming BASIC on my V-Tech pseudocomputer, at age 9. But that's a world away from tiktok, reels and the predatory surveillance economy.
I think my proposal is easier for parents to enforce, and programming can wait. matter of fact, programming isn't a special skill to learn.
You can teach kids electronics, have them construct toys that work on batteries,etc... work on components that don't require programming. teach them algorithms, math, crypto,etc.. without using computers.
If you're teaching kids how to code, you should give them the skills that will help them learn _what_ to code first?
Pulleys fulcrums, and wheels are not addictive.
Do fulcrums even exist, as independent physical objects? What you say about them not being addictive tempts me to do an entire packet of fulcrums, but I don't know where I could buy any or what they'd look like.
This ban (or attempt to regulate), similar to Australia's, is at least 10-15 years too late to be honest. It likely would have stopped or lessened the negative impact of FB (and its ilk, but mostly FB, tbh) on much of the society.
Now we know, of course, and everything in hindsight is 20/20.
It's STILL worth trying to regulate social media, now emboldened and firmly established as a rite of passage among youth, adults, and older generations.
There is an interesting exploration of human networks discussed in this veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYlon2tvywA
Basically, when network connectivity increases, the "bad" nodes can overwhelm the "good" nodes. The other ideas discussed are really interesting; well worth watching.
Great. Please raise the age to 115.
I was thinking I know a few people over 65 who are being radicalised, might be an idea to ban it for them too.
The serious answer is that banning "social media" is a bit silly. We should concentrate on controlling the addictive aspects of it, and ensuring the algorithms are fair and governed by the people.
Even if you're half-joking, there's a very real point to this. It's really not solving the problem. It's moving it very so slightly down the line.
I'm not entirely sure how I'd want to word it, but it would be something like: It is prohibited to profit from engagement generated by triggering negative emotions in the public.
You should be free to run a rage-bait forum, but you cannot profit from it, as that would potentially generate a perverse incentive to undermine trust in society. You can do it for free, to ensure that people can voice their dissatisfaction with the government, working conditions, billionaires, the HOA and so on. I'd carve out a slight exception for unions being allowed to spend membership fees to run such forums.
Also politicians should be banned from social media. They can run their own websites.
you are on social media right now.
And Tylenol is a drug just the same as heroin. Do you think that HN has the same sort of impacts on people as instagram or facebook?
Do you think a law which restricts "social media" will be crafted delicately enough to affect Instagram and Facebook but not HN?
Of course not, instead kids will be logging into some russian/chinese 4chan-esque service which has no qualms about the opinion of US law.
In principle, certainly. In practice, Congress can't be trusted to craft more or less any law these days. I'm not necessarily sure that the law will be able to help us here, but I also think it's not helpful to take the broadest possible definition of social media to try to shutdown discussion. (I'm not suggesting that you are doing that)
Australia's soon-to-take-effect ban affects nine platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, but not HN. These bans often operate on the amount of users a platform has, so HN is unlikely to make the cut. Nobody cares about this site.
I'd gladly give up HN if it means Instagram and Facebook are eradicated. Yes, yes, "those that would trade liberty for security...", but we were better off without any form of social media at all.
I often wonder if posts like this, along with the people who want to ban all cars, etc are just rage bait. Fortunately most of the population disagrees with your preferences. I give “general social media ban” around a 1% chance of success.
Yes, plenty of users here compulsively posting and compulsively checking for responses/upvotes/etc.
I'm aware. If I lost the forum on HN as a side effect, I'd probably be happier overall.
how would society even survive if under-15s couldn't access HN?
the horror!
You know that you can just, you know, cancel your ISP contract and live in a hut in Montana, right?
HN is 'social media', btw.
> HN is 'social media', btw.
Sure is! If you read the thread before posting in the thread, you'd see that it's come up already.
I'm curious as to how social media gets defined for these bans.
I presume text messaging doesn't count whereas Discord/WhatsApp do? What about Minecraft and other games? What about school platforms which they can post comments/messages on? Is watching YouTube included? When I've filled in surveys about our children's social media use, they have included YouTube, which makes it look like every child is on social media.
It does not really require a lot of nuance. Any platforms serving short-form content using algorithmic recommendations, giving any random account infinite reach, a la Instagram/Tiktok/Youtube/Shorts/Reels/Redbook/etc are part of the problem.
WhatsApp groups are a source of slightly different issues - fake news, radicalization, social bubbles - but not a source of addiction to the same level, especially among the young.
I'm a bit suspicious: it was Denmark's government that pushed for chat control.
Why don't governments start at the source instead of at the access?
I always have questions that go a bit deeper but maybe because I think differently. I understand it can trample on rights, but I guess I like to still ask and have the thought experiment anyway.
If things like this are so harmful, and it's recognized why is it okay for a parent to give their child access to it in the first place? Why do kids get to control what they have access to just because parents don't want to parent well, and because they think it'll be a death sentence for their kids social groups? Is it feasible to police parents in that way? Would we even want that?
Think of it similar to alcohol laws. E.g. in the US you don't just want kids to be unable to buy alcohol when their parent is present, you want the point of access to participate in that restriction or it won't work in practice because getting 100% of kids to have good judgement all of the time (or watching them constantly for their whole life) is not realistic. At the same time, many states still have laws allowing alcohol consumption by minors in the presence of their parent because it's really hard to get everyone to agree on a universal binary cutoff with no exception.
In practice, the law does help greatly in spite of not being a mathematical proof the minor will no longer get alcohol because of "parenting well" alone and almost all parents are fine with the restrictions, even in places without the flexibility, because they've come to see and agree with the level of harm over the years. Ie. there is a point enough parents agree strongly enough that the common good of children is accepted over the rights of a parent to decide their child's welfare - it's just usually a hogh bar (e.g. how far punishment can go before it turns into abuse, as another example).
It should be implemented in India too. Biggest consumer market is there I guess.
I don't know if that can be implemented, but to me it seems the main problem is the algorithmic feed. I think I would be okay with kids having access to social media, but only if they can't get personalized feed, but can see their friends and maybe specific topics.
I think this would be good for kids but also I want that sort of feed as an adult.
But those "friends" can also be bullies, etc.
> The move would give some parents — after a specific assessment — the right to let their children access social media from age 13. It wasn’t immediately clear how such a ban would be enforced: Many tech platforms already restrict pre-teens from signing up. Officials and experts say such restrictions don’t always work.
This makes it almost sound like a no-op once enough children convince their parents to give exemptions. Hopefully it works out better than that.
Our current form of asocial media is nothing else like drug abuse.
The problem is not "social media", that's just an insanely broad and poorly category. HN is probably "social media". Many games are probably "social media".
The problem is that certain platforms exploit people for profit by feeding them crap, from political propaganda to ads for weight loss drugs. Many of them are designed to be addictive so folks can keep up "engagement". Enough eyeballs make all crap profitable, or something like that.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are tons of great platforms that young people can benefit from, and vice versa. Including HN. Many subreddits. Tons of forums. Loads online games.
Ban the exploitation. Ban the propaganda. Ban the abuse. But don't ban young people.
I agree that it's a broad category, and that Hacker News is social media.
But of all the problematic advertising you could choose, you choose instead political advertising and semaglutide ads?
That's probably the solution: You can run a social media, but you have to do it ad free. Charge people if you need to, but you cannot run ads. What fucks up social media is the constant need to "engagement".
this is a familiar discourse. Ads are more than a thing you "run," they're an idea. You can't destroy the idea of ads. "Ad free" isn't possible to guarantee. Does this make sense?
First part makes sense, ad free seems very possible to me, especially if backed by legislation.
OK very nice… Now tell me how will they use this law to increase surveillance on everyone.
Even over the age 15, they have to be restricted.
What are the benefits, with excessive use at least?
Why was 15 chosen? I assume there's evidence that older children and adults are able to use social media responsibly and therefore not harmed?
Laws don't require foundation let alone scientific evidence. If either were the case laws would rarely be passed. For Denmark I'd assume it's just vibes among the law makers social class. They have a worldview and by God they will impose it.
Consuming is not the same as producing.
They should only ban consuming. (impossible I know, but that hints to the real problem)
Kids need to create.
my kid and me when I was a kid and my Mom and Dad when they were kids have been creators. you don’t need a fucking phone or “social” media to be a creator, what nonsense!
Ok buddy, calm down... we're talking inside of the frame of reference of social media here. No need to go stone age with pine cones and sticks on me.
Kids need to create.
I grew up without access to social media until I was 17, had my first "smartphone" at 15.
I am certain it prevented a lot of harm from me.
You can really tell the parents vs non-parents in these comments.
Indeed.. All those people that have kids but are not fit to be called a parent so they need the government to do their job!
You usually apply bans like this to something that is unhealthy for _everyone_ e.g. smoking. So why isn't the focus on regulating social media to be better? It seems like it's not great for the whole population in its current form.
"Bans like this" include drinking age, driving age, military service age, consensual sex age, R rated movie age, etc.
To which, I assume, the same question applies?
Generally those don't have population wide, negative impacts (except maybe drinking). I would compare it more to smoking which is considered a public health issue and we regulated smoking out of the market through a combination of safety regulations, limitations on marketing etc. Age bans were part of that but the ID checking requirements there were substantially less risky due to little no risks of retention.
Your initial comment may not have been well stated.
It asserts that underage bans are usually applied to things that are unhealthy for all.
You follow that by stating that provided examples of underage bans are things that are not things with negative impacts on populations.
I'd suggest that real world examples exist of adolecsent alcohol induced brain damage, drivers 10-16 having higher rates of accidents causing death and injury, child soldiers having a negative impact on society, industrial scale under age sex in Christian Brother homes having bad outcomes, early exposure to excessive porn being cited as causing brain rot and social malfunction, etc.
As for:
> we regulated smoking out of the market through a combination of safety regulations, limitations on marketing etc.
I'd point to Australia that started down that path with good results, and continued further only to regulate tobacco out of "regular" markets into the embrace of black markets that come with worse problems than the older established markets that "had a code" (established criminals rarely went after family or indiscriminately acted such that bystanders were killed or injured).
You raise interesting questions that deserve deeper thought and consideration.
Germanys ID has the technical means to allow something like that (age verification without disclosing identity), but knowing the German Gov and their absolute stasis something like this will never happen. It is absolutely necessary to do something like this, because social media has a net negative influence on society.
A lot of kids in my daughters class (~7yo's) are consuming brain rot content already. They shout "SIGMA BOY" or "SKIBIDI TOILET" like little retards during lessons. Yeah memes are cool and all, but not at this age.
While at it, ban lootboxes.
If you trespass (as kid under 15 or guardian of said kid), do you get fined?
Why is it always "ban something"? Do we have solutions other than ban everything?
The other option is to destroy something
Denmark seems extremely well governed.
Reading these comments makes me very happy I decided I should not have children.
I think we need fewer people having children but I also think the whole community should help raise these fewer children.
Does that include YouTube? I couldn’t tell from the article.
Make it so!
This is making me hopeful and wish to see this implemented in UK (and everywhere) yesterday..
What we can be certain of: there's going to be a hell of "lobbying" against it.
I wouldn't be surprised if Trump himself comes out crying how this is undermining USA commercial and business intetests! :)
I hope they can differentiate between social media and social networks.
Is chess.com considered a social media?
Crazy how many people are cheering for this absolute nanny state of affairs
Someone's gotta protect them kids from seeing videos of Gaza... And not only in Denmark...
https://israelpalestinenews.org/oracle-tiktok-israel/
i am thankfull for cellphoneless childhood. Wishing same thing upon my children. Worst thing about all of this is the peer pressure, if all your friends have a phone then you become an outcast, so it is a team effort from all parents.
>Denmark's government aims to alienate hundreds of thousands of citizens And people wonder why governments fail. Every time you carve out exceptions you are hollowing out the foundation of your government. Children of the elite' access to social media will remain of course, can't hollow out your true foundation
IMO banning smartphone sales to kids and teens would be far more productive than digital ID shenanigans.
i support this
As long as the workarounds the kids come up with aren't more harmful than what's being banned, which is usually the case.
I am in New Zealand and we are debating this now
I am a dissenter. A ban for children is onerous and how can it be enforced? Who will be punished for infractions?
Better a legal code of conduct for platforms that want to raise revenue in your jurisdiction (the important ones, that the state has leverage over). The code should do two things:
1. Prohibit the targeting of individuals below 21
2. Mandate moderation of spaces where young people gather, with resources to enforce it
A ban is much more satisfying to the do goobers and much worse for those it is supposed to protect
how would you effect what you propose, though, and would such be significantly more difficult to realize than what denmark is proposing?
It would place the compliance burden on social media companies not on parents
Effect it? If you (a social media co.) disobey you cannot collect ad revenue. Advertising on the platform could be banned.
Moving the burden off individual parents who often have a lot on their plates.
every affliction people think children have is affecting adults as well
The one thing I don't see and always wonder about with these sorts of things is how they define "social media". Seems like a tough thing to do - if you cast too broad a definition you'll end up with just about anywhere one can communicate on the internet, including email. If you take the very narrow approach of naming FB, IG, TikTok, etc., you almost certainly miss out on whatever the next platform is that's relevant to kids.
Remember YikYak? IIRC that was worse for kids than most of the big social media sites, but how do you write a law that anticipates the next YikYak without banning everything?
I don't think it really matters if the definition is too narrow as long as you ward off the worst threats. An easier way to classify them would be by size: any social network with over 1000 users should have to regulate their users. So as soon as something starts being relevant from a public safety perspective it'll fall under the law.
Good, IMO it should be 18 if not even higher, but 15 is a good start.
Make it 21.
A reminder, a ban on <$age is actually an ban on $everyone who doesn't provide positive proof of age using identity document.
here we go again...
Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has all crypto fascists governments become wary
This is not enough, we have to ban under 15s from having smart phones in general.
Let‘s ban social media altogether. In twenty years from now we will have found out that social media is more harmful than tobacco and alcohol combined.
A reason to be cautious about propositions like these isn't just the inherent belittling of children's right to information, which can be argued for or against in certain cases, but the aspect of giving any proceeding government the ability to ban a form of media from children due to their perception of toxicity, derangement, danger, et cetera.
The inherent belittling of children's right to the enjoyment of alcoholic drinks... Our current form of social media is a drug and it harms our children in all ways and adults too btw.
I don't buy it. The most relevant critique is see is that it's hard to control the age of your users without removing anonymous accounts thus limiting privacy. Well, it's a hard problem but it doesn't feel impossible to solve.
To me there is no question that children should grow up protected from harmful substances. You don't want kids to smoke, scrolling algo feeds is not better. There is enough interesting internet out there without social media!
> You don't want kids to smoke, scrolling algo feeds is not better.
That's a dogmatic axiom until you can show how TikTok causes lung cancer.
You're right, I didn't produce evidence in my comment. Smoking and lung cancer are more clear cut than social media problems in general.
The effects of social media are more complex and nuanced than smoking. There are a lot of studies that show that social media has a negative effect on mental well being. When someones dies of loneliness or birth rates collapse and young people have less sex than ever, social media is never the only cause and might not even be the main reason, but it seems to play an important role.
Also, I don't think all social media is bad. I do love these discussions on HN even or especially when we don't agree, but tiktok and similar services have a lot of bad incentives with regards to user well being.