I teach children. You have no idea how much social media has affected their attention, memory, critical reasoning and social skills: the social repercussions will be felt for decades.
And this isn't mentioning exposing easily malleable minds to propaganda paid for by states that see the UK as an enemy, all before their critical reasoning skills, and awareness of their emotions, and how their emotions can be used against them, have had the chance to develop.
I expect this to massively electorally backfire on the government. But in the long run, it will be more than worth it. The only alternative would be to blanket ban phones in schools, although they'll still be plugged into social media the minute they leave.
Tbh I've never understood why a strict non-negotiable ban on phones in schools hasn't been in place. This is an easy win with no negative consequences for adults.
Do you agree that parents should be the one protecting their children from this 'propaganda' and internet slop?
Whilst I agree that social media can be overwhelmingly negative especially for young people, dont you recon that the risk to privacy and free-nature / increased surveillance of the internet is a greater problem?
I know many people dislike this movement but really, I think it's a good idea. Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, but that's gone already anyway. Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
I see both children and adults being manipulated by corporations with "algorithms". Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access
Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state. Now the top voted comment (at least at time of me responding) is an open-arms welcoming of the internet police state and voicing support for removal of the free internet?
How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them? That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too? It's right there in the article. Think about how this has to be enforced: The only way to guarantee under-16s are banned from these sites is to force everyone to produce ID. You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
OG internet was not swarming with multibillion dollar predators ready to exploit every single psychological trick to manipulate you for profit. If you can solve this, i welcome the OG internet to be free and open place to share ideas. Let me know your suggestions.
And not just that, these networks are becoming a conduit for all kind of disturbed people to invade the privacy of kids and pollute their world, sometimes convincing them to harm themselves, including suicide. Let's face it, as the internet has become more and more accessible to just about anybody, needing to police the space was bound to become inevitable.
I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them.
Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.
The slippery slope arguments do nothing. People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
We're bringing it up because it's not being mentioned and we think it's important.
I that once freedom of speech and freedom to communicate and freedom to decent are gone they are gone for good.
I dislike very much that politicians like Peter Kyle and Jess Philips have tried to shut down dissenting voices by comparing them to paedophiles or saying this is just about access to porn.
I'm really angry about this. I don't want to live in a "nanny state" and will probably end up voting for a party I otherwise dislike just get this crap repealed.
Labour, Tories and Greens don't seem to care about personal freedom. I do and I'm fed having politicians and journalists that don't listen to me.
Destroying freedom isn't a fucking compromise. If algorithmic feeds are as bad as say, heroin, then the correct response is to regulate or ban them. You're arguing for the Internet version of legalising heroin and installing a physical surveillance state to target the addicts, it's absolute fucking insanity.
> I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them.
I couldn't tell if this post was satire at first read.First it complains about not weighting tradeoffs, then it follows up with a demand that we ignore the tradeoffs as noise and just push through with the regulations.
You see the irony, right? You're stunned that people can't weigh tradeoffs, then you switch to dismissing tradeoffs as noise:
> People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
Considering the second order and higher order consequences of regulations is the entire point.
You're just waving them all away with an assumption that they will be solved in the future.
Trying to shut down discussion about the consequences of government action as noise is scary. We've reached levels of moral panic that people like you are happy to close your eyes to any consequences and insist we let the government take control and do whatever they want right now, without considering the consequences.
> people like you are happy to close your eyes to any consequences and insist we let the government take control and do whatever they want right now, without considering the consequences.
Nobody said anything of the sort. That's the problem with trying to debate this: you're interpolation this stance into people who don't have it at all.
> Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.
False. The whole point of fundamental rights is that they aren’t compromised on based on outcomes.
“Torture is bad, but not being able to get information out of criminals is also bad. Some compromise must be made.” That’s just not how it works, is it?
>Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
There is certainly an angle where people are fed up with the current state of things.
But generally speaking, the overall HN has been trending towards anti-free-internet and embracing the police state for a long time. I am pretty sure people can run an LLM on HN comments over the years.
Over time it's become harder and harder to deny how bad some aspects of the internet are for people, especially for young people. Whether it's right or wrong it's not shocking that people are more willing than ever to entertain the idea of internet restrictions.
I'd dig deeper on the problem though. More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.
Yet we have laws around child endangerment. I'm a big supporter of parental sovereignty, but I also acknowledge that if society operates the way it does, I can't immediately think of a good reason why "mental health endangerment" (which social media for kids very much is) wouldn't be included in the broader scope of endangerment.
> More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.
Also yeah? Sure? You may not like that that’s the conclusion. Why does everyone say this like it’s some kind of gotcha? Children are incapable biologically of making good decisions.
But yes, I cannot make these decisions of myself and want the state to step in. It’s way too big a surface area.
I don't say it as a gotcha. I say it to make clear that its an assumption baked into these laws that (a) I'm not sure a strong majority of people agree with and (b) creates further precedent for more government control over our lives and our children.
Edit: why is it you know these decisions should be made but you can't do it yourself? Do you not trust yourself, like an alcoholic avoiding one drink because it turns into 12, or do you not think you're capable of making the right choice at all?
It doesn't surprise me at all. At least in the US, both major political parties fully embrace censorship and a police state. Sure the disagree on the details, but they agree pretty universally on the direction.
Because it’s a lesser evil, at least in the UK, which has a reasonably well functioning government and society.
As much as it pains me, I’d rather have that than the brain rot being forced on young kids. And you can argue all you want about “parental control”, but there are too many parents who don’t care, plus peer pressure is a real thing.
I also think that at that age all the social media sites are a net negative.
Why do you think we lost free internet right now? In my opinion we lost it when all corporations switched to mass surveilance. Now we just stop pretending that social media corporations are not responsible for anything.
There are very likely people who's work is to shill... Also here... If not influencing editors of entire sites even. But they are only needed until it becomes full though crime to even think outside of newspeak ;)
As an engineer, I tend to view solutions in terms of tradeoffs and not absolutes. 20 years ago the free and open internet was great. Now I think we’ve gone too far. And more to the point, I think freedom is protected by regulation, not by handing decisions over to whatever billionaire won a cage match.
This is the gen-x part of my xennial talking, but I can’t help but feel like something has been lost when nothing is transgressive anymore. Some people look back and say how can a gen x’er who fought against censorship be so pro censorship now.
A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do. I think there’s a sort of weird like - there’s something distopian about Elon Musk putting his stamp of approval on using edgy racial slurs on social media. If you’re young and want to make edgy jokes. It’s supposed to be transgressive! It’s _not_ supposed to get Elon Musk’s stamp of approval.
I don’t want to send anyone to jail for bypassing these laws or saying the wrong thing. It’s a hard needle to thread, but we need a code of conduct so people can make a choice to break it. So people can create alternate websites to the big social media companies. We need institutions without so much power so they can be jailbroken. And government is just plainly not the only powerful institution I fear.
I’m becoming something of an accelerationist on this issue. I think we’re at a dead end with like 5 companies controlling most of the internet. If this pisses people off and encourages them to get active politically or create new modes of communication. Great!
Freedom has to be more than “you can choose any walled garden you want!” We need more spaces that aren’t mediated.
I feel like we’ve accepted this terrible definition of freedom, out of fear it could get worse, not because we love what we have.
But not to worry, I feel comfortable having contrarian views, because my one vote isn’t going to radically change the world.
You're basing everything on a flawed assumption: That the regulations will be most difficult for the big websites, but not be an impediment to small communities.
It never works that way. The more regulations you add, the harder it becomes to have a small community on the internet. The big companies can spend money to comply and lobby. The small communities cannot.
We are already seeing this. There are websites blocking the UK because they can't afford to comply with all of their laws. Even websites that try to block the UK are getting threats from Ofcom for not ID-checking their users: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1rk690v/i_ru...
The end game of your accelerationism isn't a utopia where we're all back to small communities.
The end game is that small communities die out because the only companies who can navigate, comply, and lobby are those 5 companies you hated. You're cheering on the consolidation of the internet.
Because we've been conditioned to believe that every good thing harbors a dark and sinister secret, that every attempt at improving our situation contains a fatal flaw.
It's a narrative trope, not real life. Come back to reality. It's what Omelas was trying to convey.
> The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state.
I grew up on that internet too (the freedom part). Do you really believe it is the same internet now?
Gone are the days when one could run their own mail server now because Apple or Google or Microsoft can suddenly deem it as "untrustworthy" or "suspicious" (based on some algorithm) and all your email will end up in spam. IRC and newsgroups have been hijacked by centralised Messengers and Social Media firms run by BigTech. They can ban you on these platforms for no reasons, without much recourse, holding your digital life hostage. Last year, I learnt that the much vaunted "free speech" no longer exists online - I have to fight and waste time with everyone - from the moderators to the platform "community managers" - to publish any factual pro-palestine or anti-Israli-right posts because these are being heavily censored on all western platforms (and unfortunately all English language communities are western platforms). Election manipulations by foreign platforms are also another danger every sovereign nations now faces.
> How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them?
So I wouldn't say that people are being "naive". We don't want to live in an "echo chamber" controlled by western or Chinese BigTech corporates and their ideas of techno-fascism. Not to mention that we really cannot ignore any more the societal and political impact of some of these platforms - Facebook / Whatsapp are responsible for causing many social unrest around the world and even genocide (How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... ).
The negative psychological impact of social media addiction is so obvious even in adults. So imagine how much worse it is on kids / teens - it truly would be irresponsible to not regulate it.
> That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Oh, very true! That is something to be very wary of. And the answer to that is to also fight for stronger privacy regulations and prevent government overreach. Not trust the government or the corporates to behave.
Here, you will have to understand and accept that unlike in America, where mistrust of government is inherent in the political structure (the US Presidential system favoured a weak central government because the makers were distrustful of a powerful Federal government) is very much in contrast to other parts of the world. Europeans expect and have more trust in their governments to regulate some aspects of their society, while the rest of the world prefers a "strong" Central government (and thus it is expected that the government will regulate many aspects of society). That is something fundamentally different vis American politics vs the rest of the world, that perhaps befuddles Americans.
In a democracy though, I don't see anything wrong in "trusting" your government more than local or foreign corporates (or even a foreign country - for all the talk about how America stood for "free speech", my experience with American / western owned platforms censoring my political ideas and beliefs has made me increasingly cynical if they ever truly believe in democratic values; so yeah - I guess you could also say that all this is also perhaps a backlash to current western politics).
> You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
No, I want more. I want us to not be able to use these sites at all.
The modern internet has become a cesspool. There’s some good stuff here and there but it’s not worth the overly negative downsides. Reddit is mostly bots. YouTube is becoming clickbait slop. Social Media platforms are ruining society.
We need an alternative to the internet. Not long ago, we did not have all these things and it was one of the best times to be alive.
I disagree. I don’t have a huge problem with the UK government monitoring my online presence; I’m reasonably sure my ISP is siphoning all that information to them anyway. That may be problematic for some, but I’m ok with it.
My problem is that this info doesn’t go to the government; it goes to persona and Yoti. We are literally giving government issued IDs to tracking platforms to tell Meta, Google, ByteDance, Reddit who we are.
This isn’t about keeping children safe - if it was the law would be to mandate parental controls on devices. I’d stand behind that law.,
I'm not saying the war on drugs has been successful by any means.
But legalization has also been a really disappointing flop. After marijuana was legalized in my state, it has been really disturbing to see usage skyrocket among middle and high schoolers. A lot of people apparently derive their standards of morality from the legal system.
Nor arguing and I do appreciate your perspective but that’s so odd: vodka is legal and middle and high schoolers shouldn’t be getting into that either.
Keeping children off social media, or to a very limited children only social media seems obviously a good thing.
My issue is the UK “free” speech standards seem to be something like free speech as long as its reasonable, doesn’t offend or excite too many people, cast aspersions on those in power etc, in other words not very free at all. And any form of internet registration could be used to tie more people to their posts.
Of course restricting posting some benefit exists as we seen in the US with robust free speech and twitter being overrun with third world posters attempting to influence domestic politics.
Isn’t it already impossible to be anonymous on the internet without flawless opsec? I’m surprised there isn’t a TV Tropes article about it but whenever a character in a show needs to be perfectly anonymous they visit an Internet cafe with a baseball cap and glasses - which while it’s a trope I think it also plays on our cultural understanding that significant diligence is required to maintain anonymity.
Edit: though I suppose the counterargument is that we shouldn’t make it any easier for surveillance states, especially technologically inept ones, to perform dragnet surveillance.
There’s a middle ground between going to cybercafes with sunglasses, and submitting a 4K scan of you gov ID before watching a YouTube video where someone says a bad word.
> Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago,
social media is not, and never was the "free internet" we all get nostalgic about. maybe the first couple of years was something tangential, but that died very quickly. since then it's been a nightmare-ish hellscape of surveillance, manipulation and hate.
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
anyone claiming something like that is happening here is just spreading paranoiac FUD via a cheap and lazy straw man. if UK law starts requiring me to provide ID just to read rust crate documentation or connect to the internet then that is an issue. i would be very unhappy about it. but that is not happening here.
let's not be drama queens about it.
> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
i've asserted for a very long bloody time that major social media platforms, not the internet in general, should require government ID verification of some sort to have an account. would likely make it far easier for the police to prosecute a lot of the nasty shit that only happens on those platforms.
having said that, these platforms are designed to prioritise engagement and angry, toxic and hate-filled people click more. so it's the platform's fault but as ever they're not cleaning up their mess.
if folks on HN wanna blame someone or get angry then get angry at the platforms for letting it get to where we are today. it's their own fucking faults.
At some point you have to allow people to see what they want to see. You don't have to make it so that what they want to see is pushed on them, though, and this is what modern social media does. It pushes stuff just because it's engaging.
This is not about the good of the people. And the sooner you realize that this type of regulation will be used to manipulate you as much as what you fear is happening already the better.
The government is an entity that acts to protect itself. It has and always will fear an open and informed public.
majority of parents are in favour of such a ban, otherwise they wouldn't do it
if social media companies hadn't made social media a total cesspit of disinformation, child grooming and algorithmic manipulation then the outcome might have been different
> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
Adopting the drug prohibition model is fine, if what we want is to lavishly enrich the social media cartels, and visit upon the rest of the world needless crime, misery, addiction, and death.
Right. A lot of "Internet Freedom" is just dishonest Anarchism. A thought terminating cliche that halts otherwise brilliant people from actually considering the tradeoffs of policies like this.
The whole appeal of Anarchy is that The State always has the potential to become Evil. So, at a (very quick) first pass - eliminating The State kinda seems like it heads off some bad futures.
While some of the HN commentariat may be anarchists, you and I at least are not.
Strong worded comment but yes, it's exhausting seeing people here of all places arguint against their own rights and the freedom of the internet :/ I guess the fight is already lost. Remember when people literally went to the streets while fighting SOPA, PIPA and ACTA?
From someone that’s been here a decade longer than you: actually insubstantial comments don’t belong here and comments that show how people’s thinking evolve are welcome contributions.
Why do you think I'm like the people destroying the Internet? Because I said a bad word? Are you actually retarded? I'd love to return to the Internet we had in the 90s and 2000s, we're not going to get there if defeatist bitches like you cave and let the governments of the world control who is allowed to serve http responses to people that don't put their government ID in the header and route it through a 3rd party.
Interesting that Canada is trying to do the same thing. Seems suspiciously similar.
The idea that this is about surveillance is also interesting.
I think it's important we ask: could we invoke this ban without surveillance?
- identity scan is one solution
But surely there are other solutions? Can't you just make laws that get kids in trouble if they get caught on social media? Kids get in trouble for missing school.. there are other incentives than identify checks, surely?
I’m in favor of this, but it doesn’t solve the full problem. If all your friends use social media as the fabric of their social interactions, you’ll be ostracized if you opt out as an individual.
IOW its a coordination problem. You need most of the other parents in your social group to also implement those controls.
Simpler still, a “minor” bit on the phone, set by parents once. All services must respect the bit in http headers, and app stores should refuse to install certain apps. No need for id check
I imagine that many parent don’t want micromanage their kids apps, this takes care of the problem.
Kids find ways around everything. Even adults find the 'digital wellbeing' tools on Android and iOS useless. Just look at the multitude of apps available for digital self regulation these days (ScreenZen, Freedom, BlockSite, etc). No single solution works for everybody at the moment.
Regulation by itself is also insufficient. But maybe combining regulation with parental controls plus other measures will be effective. A 'defense in depth' or swiss cheese strategy, with multiple layers of protection.
I do hope we figure out what layers are needed soon, though. It feels like we're running out of time.
I think the idea is that while individuals will absolutely find ways round it, it should help to reduce the network effect of everyone a kid knows being already on it. How true that is remains to be seen.
One campaign I’ve liked is one in the UK to try and get the parents of whole year groups in school to agree to not buy phones until their children are a certain age. This removes a lot of the peer pressure of ‘my friends all have one’.
Except they are. I’m not aware of any actual bypasses of parental controls on iOS or android. You choose apps and allow or deny them, and you provide limits which are guarded by passcodes or parental prompt (on iOS at least).
> It feels like we're running out of time.
I mean, does it? It feels like we’re running guns blazing into something that will be trivially bypassable (hello free VPN to some random European country - remember Hola?).
>Interesting that Canada is trying to do the same thing. Seems suspiciously similar.
Australia already did. Commonwealth countries share a lot in common, and of course a lot of problems are common across many countries.
But let's be real -- these countries are announcing it in lockstep because the US is a corrupt plutocracy, and the lords of the nation like Mark Zuckerberg will run to Trump and he'll have a little tantrum (tantrums that always, it should be mentioned, just hurt Americans more. Everything is in the service of the billionaire class) about this.
It's tougher for that grifter to do so if so many countries do it simultaneously.
>The idea that this is about surveillance is also interesting.
What idea is that? That firms from foreign nations will gather IDs, of absolutely zero value for the country, to ensure age compliance? How does this silly conspiracy work?
Kids motivated will just get around it. But I think it's pretty clear at this point, given the idiocracies rising worldwide and how everything is getting stupider/worse, that social media has not been a net good.
Do you not see that the largest companies on the internet are also surveilling everyone and that the massive troves of data they're collecting about their registered users and even non-registered users is directly and indirectly accessible to governments around the world?
How is it “obviously about the kids”? Is it because they mentioned them? I would argue it will impact the kids but this isn’t being done for their benefit, it’s being done to regulate what we have access to as a whole. Slippery slope coming up!
The way this has been pushed through after countless attempts over the past decade, and push back from advising experts, does not feel like it originates from genuine concern for children. It feels like a state trying to wrestle for digital control amidst rising civil unrest.
Somehow all the countries are suddenly proposing the same thing. You'd think at least one of these countries might try something different if they actually cared about the kids, like banning algorithmic feeds. Not suspicious at all.
But so has trust in government (for very good reasons). And those same unscrupulous governments are heavily influenced by the very same tech companies people are suspicious of.
I'm probably going down a conspiracy theory, but it's notable when all the Five Eyes countries seem to start talking about the same problem and pushing through legislation. The US would probably do the same if not for the constitution.
Not sure how closely you follow US news, but a majority of Americans feel that the current US administration is not all that concerned with the constitution, so that not really a blocker.
Not beyond the realms of possibility that Meta etc has decided it wants government/photo ID and has convinced governments to implement it
Big tech will act inconvenienced but they will in reality benefit
Just like any attempt by a UK Gov to fix housing: they just make it worse, because that was the real aim (yes I include the latest renter's rights legislation)
I happened to talk to a teenage relative about this possibility the other day and she said that she'd be fine with a ban. It seems that it's not as big a deal if everyone's in the same boat. Parents genuinely have a hard time navigating this because drawing a line for their own children has the effect of socially excluding them.
It's not ideal in many senses (what age checks are we talking about here) but its worth thinking about some of the positive effects this might have on the young people growing up in the mess we've made of new media.
When you try to ban people from doing something they find ways to do it illegally. Humans have a need to socialize and kids are not going to stop using the internet for that just because of some law.
Aided by their parents, I'm sure, they will find seedier ways to do this. Ways that are not regulated at all, even by sensible laws that prevent direct exploitation. The parents obviously don't care that their kids use social media, otherwise they would take steps to stop it.
These laws are not going to bring back the days where we all were riding our bikes outside and reading physical books. That's not the way of life for these kids. But it's, very likely, going to put children in a more dangerous situation as they try to find some kind of solution to their social needs online.
Counterpoint - this is a coordination problem, there are studies suggesting that most kids would rather not participate in the whole social media thing but an individual can’t opt out.
It’s very possible that a policy like this could give everyone a new Schelling point to coordinate around, and thus change the default behavior.
We will see! I certainly agree this policy won’t prevent the kids that really want to use an app.
I asked my Ouija board some questions and determined that:
- Select 3rd parties friends of government officials will be taxpayer funded to verify government ID's and live facial recognition.
- Said data will be "accidentally leaked" and somehow a myriad of 3rd parties and criminals end up with this data.
- People will be encouraged to purchase some form of identity protection monitoring service.
- People will conclude or theorize that all of this could have been avoided.
I have some ideas that could solve this without impacting anyone currently using the internet but there are no financial incentives for government officials to participate thus such ideas are dead in the water.
When considering how to think about these restrictions, I turn to my 15 year old self back in the 90s and ask him "would you want the government to block you from using IRC, forums, guestbooks, and social web sites?"
His response would have been "go to hell", and he would have figured out a way to get around it anyways. Unless they're actually planning to track one government ID per person in a database, a truly horrifying idea that this project is slippery sloping towards (because if the current design is easily defeatable, then why do it at all?)
Having access to the entire internet, warts and all, as a kid did not ruin my life, it was an escape from the people I did not fit in with in the place I grew up, it taught me about humanity and ultimately led to a successful career for me.
Dave Bohnett, the founder of Geocities, stuck his neck out to protect the LGBT section of the site so that young adults could find a place to have community despite often growing up in places where it was dangerous to be gay, like it was for him when he grew up in a very conservative suburb of Chicago.
I don't think anyone has said more negative stuff about Facebook then I have, and I literally made a platform eager to try to destroy it, but this is not the way to do it. We should be thinking very, very carefully about when we let the government become our parents in scenarios like this when the unintended consequences seem quite likely be enormous and when there's no mechanism for retracting the law once it's implemented and we find out that, surprise surprise, it didn't magically cure depression in young adults.
The evidence of social media causing depression and anxiety in youth is mixed and almost all of the affirmative findings are correlational, so I expect to see a variety of takes in this comment thread.
Personally, the strongest positive evidence I've seen comes from the natural experiments tracking when high speed internet & phones were introduced geographically. Rates of teen depression do seem to topple in very close sync with this, as discussed here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
Can you provide some evidence that it didn’t work in Australia? Given the ban hasn’t been in place that long I’d like to see your sources about it not working.
Limited success might be a better term. But if a supposedly blanket ban only stopped 30% of under-16s accounts from accessing social media, that does seem pretty failure-esque.
This is a story about non-compliance. One hopes the Aus government is going to take some sort of enforcement action. If _that_ fails, then you could claim limited success or failure.
Presumably you wouldn't call laws against murder a failure because there are murders.
To this I say: Hey kids, go grow your own groups using free/libre open source decentralised, distributed post-blockchain holochain-powered https://moss.social
Tbh, I think that this is still putting the blame on users and not in the actual tool designed to be as addictive as possible. It's like blaming people who get addicted to cigarettes.
A lot of reporting seems to state that it's only for "high risk social media". Is that the case? Are they really picking and choosing which social media they will ban for under 16s?
If there was any smart way of doing it, we should block it for everyone. Very little good has come of it. Also solves the age verification problem. It’s soooo difficult to not fall into the addiction trap, and I’m exhausted from keeping myself away from it.
I like it. We don’t need social media. It is just a convenient way for the elites to collect data and push agendas, and people can communicate in other online ways without limiting themselves to short attention span, doom scrolling and others. TBH I’d be happy that it doesn’t exist.
Quebec has it, too. IMO it should be banned for under-18s instead of under-16s.
When the OSA came into force I checked the iOS App Store and the top 10 apps in the UK at the time were all dodgy free VPNs. This legislation is utterly idiotic.
I'm sick of this government, they won't be getting my vote in the next GE.
If the operators are liable, they will find a way, it's easy for the operators to infer a users age based on usage patterns. They must be required to close these accounts.
It doesn't need to be perfect, but in spite of that perfect is possible if people ask for it. Don't tempt them. Look at what happened in Spain with Cloudflare.
Isn't that better? For one, they're connected to peers they have physically met. Additionally, they won't be exposed to strangers or ads that warp their world view.
I still believe that the government should ban unsolicited algorithmic content (so search engines are exempted), but this is a second best option.
Also, stop your BS about a prison system, its not whats going on globally. You are just buying into the BS that Facebook and company are sending you. Good on you for buying into their propaganda. The world existed before social media and it will keep existing.
OR we can try to move this to the positive side instead of fighting the fascists. We dont NEED social media, its a cancer on humanity. So maybe instead accept this BS and move it towards a place that we can all agree upon. I understand the UK political system is corrupt to its core, like all world goverments, but that's not the reason why to ignore and give in to
what the government is demanding.
There will still be social media. Most of the public conversation will still take place there. You just won't be able to use it anonymously (possibly not even read it).
The actual ban passed a couple months ago, after the data in your link was collected. But also, smoking bans (etc) had hugely positive effects on smoking rates. There's every reason to be positive.
Wow looking at your history, please chill. You are very clearly related to the powers at be, i guess you feel unsafe unless uncle sam tucks you in at night. I feel sorry for you at this point...
Same as whenever they talk about banning anything in society… They can’t keep drugs, weapons, phones, etc. out of prisons, which are entirely under government purview. Elect clowns, expect a circus.
Our governments seem to have just two tools for big issues in society (because they're quick and cheap):
- Nudging, propaganda, posters and automated announcements
- New legislation to ban something
If something can't be fixed with either of those, nothing gets fixed. Shockingly this happens a lot!
Their mates will make some money and lobbyists appeased, then they'll get distracted about what to ban and clutch pearls over next, and the issues our children have will persist and get worse
If they were really concerned, they'd be doing something about the algorithmic feeds pumping right wing vitreol into everything and Elon constantly begging for race wars to start.
And this isn't mentioning exposing easily malleable minds to propaganda paid for by states that see the UK as an enemy, all before their critical reasoning skills, and awareness of their emotions, and how their emotions can be used against them, have had the chance to develop.
I expect this to massively electorally backfire on the government. But in the long run, it will be more than worth it. The only alternative would be to blanket ban phones in schools, although they'll still be plugged into social media the minute they leave.
Whilst I agree that social media can be overwhelmingly negative especially for young people, dont you recon that the risk to privacy and free-nature / increased surveillance of the internet is a greater problem?
I see both children and adults being manipulated by corporations with "algorithms". Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
> Yes, it removes the "free" internet
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access
Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state. Now the top voted comment (at least at time of me responding) is an open-arms welcoming of the internet police state and voicing support for removal of the free internet?
How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them? That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too? It's right there in the article. Think about how this has to be enforced: The only way to guarantee under-16s are banned from these sites is to force everyone to produce ID. You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.
The slippery slope arguments do nothing. People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
I that once freedom of speech and freedom to communicate and freedom to decent are gone they are gone for good.
I dislike very much that politicians like Peter Kyle and Jess Philips have tried to shut down dissenting voices by comparing them to paedophiles or saying this is just about access to porn.
I'm really angry about this. I don't want to live in a "nanny state" and will probably end up voting for a party I otherwise dislike just get this crap repealed.
Labour, Tories and Greens don't seem to care about personal freedom. I do and I'm fed having politicians and journalists that don't listen to me.
Huh? I must've read thousands of comments on this site over the years to the effect that any censorship of the internet would be wrong.
> Internet version of legalising heroin and installing a physical surveillance state to target the addicts
Whatever this is.
I couldn't tell if this post was satire at first read.First it complains about not weighting tradeoffs, then it follows up with a demand that we ignore the tradeoffs as noise and just push through with the regulations.
You see the irony, right? You're stunned that people can't weigh tradeoffs, then you switch to dismissing tradeoffs as noise:
> People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
Considering the second order and higher order consequences of regulations is the entire point.
You're just waving them all away with an assumption that they will be solved in the future.
Trying to shut down discussion about the consequences of government action as noise is scary. We've reached levels of moral panic that people like you are happy to close your eyes to any consequences and insist we let the government take control and do whatever they want right now, without considering the consequences.
It's terrifying that people think this way.
> people like you are happy to close your eyes to any consequences and insist we let the government take control and do whatever they want right now, without considering the consequences.
Nobody said anything of the sort. That's the problem with trying to debate this: you're interpolation this stance into people who don't have it at all.
False. The whole point of fundamental rights is that they aren’t compromised on based on outcomes.
“Torture is bad, but not being able to get information out of criminals is also bad. Some compromise must be made.” That’s just not how it works, is it?
There is certainly an angle where people are fed up with the current state of things.
But generally speaking, the overall HN has been trending towards anti-free-internet and embracing the police state for a long time. I am pretty sure people can run an LLM on HN comments over the years.
> More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.
Also yeah? Sure? You may not like that that’s the conclusion. Why does everyone say this like it’s some kind of gotcha? Children are incapable biologically of making good decisions.
But yes, I cannot make these decisions of myself and want the state to step in. It’s way too big a surface area.
Edit: why is it you know these decisions should be made but you can't do it yourself? Do you not trust yourself, like an alcoholic avoiding one drink because it turns into 12, or do you not think you're capable of making the right choice at all?
As much as it pains me, I’d rather have that than the brain rot being forced on young kids. And you can argue all you want about “parental control”, but there are too many parents who don’t care, plus peer pressure is a real thing.
I also think that at that age all the social media sites are a net negative.
You wrote this in jest, right, right?
This is the gen-x part of my xennial talking, but I can’t help but feel like something has been lost when nothing is transgressive anymore. Some people look back and say how can a gen x’er who fought against censorship be so pro censorship now.
A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do. I think there’s a sort of weird like - there’s something distopian about Elon Musk putting his stamp of approval on using edgy racial slurs on social media. If you’re young and want to make edgy jokes. It’s supposed to be transgressive! It’s _not_ supposed to get Elon Musk’s stamp of approval.
I don’t want to send anyone to jail for bypassing these laws or saying the wrong thing. It’s a hard needle to thread, but we need a code of conduct so people can make a choice to break it. So people can create alternate websites to the big social media companies. We need institutions without so much power so they can be jailbroken. And government is just plainly not the only powerful institution I fear.
So the teenagers bypass it and use other sites while us adults are handing our IDs over just to use basic websites?
How is this good?
Freedom has to be more than “you can choose any walled garden you want!” We need more spaces that aren’t mediated.
I feel like we’ve accepted this terrible definition of freedom, out of fear it could get worse, not because we love what we have.
But not to worry, I feel comfortable having contrarian views, because my one vote isn’t going to radically change the world.
It never works that way. The more regulations you add, the harder it becomes to have a small community on the internet. The big companies can spend money to comply and lobby. The small communities cannot.
We are already seeing this. There are websites blocking the UK because they can't afford to comply with all of their laws. Even websites that try to block the UK are getting threats from Ofcom for not ID-checking their users: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1rk690v/i_ru...
The end game of your accelerationism isn't a utopia where we're all back to small communities.
The end game is that small communities die out because the only companies who can navigate, comply, and lobby are those 5 companies you hated. You're cheering on the consolidation of the internet.
It's a narrative trope, not real life. Come back to reality. It's what Omelas was trying to convey.
I grew up on that internet too (the freedom part). Do you really believe it is the same internet now?
Gone are the days when one could run their own mail server now because Apple or Google or Microsoft can suddenly deem it as "untrustworthy" or "suspicious" (based on some algorithm) and all your email will end up in spam. IRC and newsgroups have been hijacked by centralised Messengers and Social Media firms run by BigTech. They can ban you on these platforms for no reasons, without much recourse, holding your digital life hostage. Last year, I learnt that the much vaunted "free speech" no longer exists online - I have to fight and waste time with everyone - from the moderators to the platform "community managers" - to publish any factual pro-palestine or anti-Israli-right posts because these are being heavily censored on all western platforms (and unfortunately all English language communities are western platforms). Election manipulations by foreign platforms are also another danger every sovereign nations now faces.
> How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them?
So I wouldn't say that people are being "naive". We don't want to live in an "echo chamber" controlled by western or Chinese BigTech corporates and their ideas of techno-fascism. Not to mention that we really cannot ignore any more the societal and political impact of some of these platforms - Facebook / Whatsapp are responsible for causing many social unrest around the world and even genocide (How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... ).
The negative psychological impact of social media addiction is so obvious even in adults. So imagine how much worse it is on kids / teens - it truly would be irresponsible to not regulate it.
> That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Oh, very true! That is something to be very wary of. And the answer to that is to also fight for stronger privacy regulations and prevent government overreach. Not trust the government or the corporates to behave.
Here, you will have to understand and accept that unlike in America, where mistrust of government is inherent in the political structure (the US Presidential system favoured a weak central government because the makers were distrustful of a powerful Federal government) is very much in contrast to other parts of the world. Europeans expect and have more trust in their governments to regulate some aspects of their society, while the rest of the world prefers a "strong" Central government (and thus it is expected that the government will regulate many aspects of society). That is something fundamentally different vis American politics vs the rest of the world, that perhaps befuddles Americans.
In a democracy though, I don't see anything wrong in "trusting" your government more than local or foreign corporates (or even a foreign country - for all the talk about how America stood for "free speech", my experience with American / western owned platforms censoring my political ideas and beliefs has made me increasingly cynical if they ever truly believe in democratic values; so yeah - I guess you could also say that all this is also perhaps a backlash to current western politics).
No, I want more. I want us to not be able to use these sites at all.
The modern internet has become a cesspool. There’s some good stuff here and there but it’s not worth the overly negative downsides. Reddit is mostly bots. YouTube is becoming clickbait slop. Social Media platforms are ruining society.
We need an alternative to the internet. Not long ago, we did not have all these things and it was one of the best times to be alive.
My problem is that this info doesn’t go to the government; it goes to persona and Yoti. We are literally giving government issued IDs to tracking platforms to tell Meta, Google, ByteDance, Reddit who we are.
This isn’t about keeping children safe - if it was the law would be to mandate parental controls on devices. I’d stand behind that law.,
Because war on drugs has been such a successful policy...?
But legalization has also been a really disappointing flop. After marijuana was legalized in my state, it has been really disturbing to see usage skyrocket among middle and high schoolers. A lot of people apparently derive their standards of morality from the legal system.
My issue is the UK “free” speech standards seem to be something like free speech as long as its reasonable, doesn’t offend or excite too many people, cast aspersions on those in power etc, in other words not very free at all. And any form of internet registration could be used to tie more people to their posts.
Of course restricting posting some benefit exists as we seen in the US with robust free speech and twitter being overrun with third world posters attempting to influence domestic politics.
Do you know how you sound? Stop falling for these tactics, no one is caring for the children while making these laws.
Edit: though I suppose the counterargument is that we shouldn’t make it any easier for surveillance states, especially technologically inept ones, to perform dragnet surveillance.
social media is not, and never was the "free internet" we all get nostalgic about. maybe the first couple of years was something tangential, but that died very quickly. since then it's been a nightmare-ish hellscape of surveillance, manipulation and hate.
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
anyone claiming something like that is happening here is just spreading paranoiac FUD via a cheap and lazy straw man. if UK law starts requiring me to provide ID just to read rust crate documentation or connect to the internet then that is an issue. i would be very unhappy about it. but that is not happening here.
let's not be drama queens about it.
> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
i've asserted for a very long bloody time that major social media platforms, not the internet in general, should require government ID verification of some sort to have an account. would likely make it far easier for the police to prosecute a lot of the nasty shit that only happens on those platforms.
having said that, these platforms are designed to prioritise engagement and angry, toxic and hate-filled people click more. so it's the platform's fault but as ever they're not cleaning up their mess.
if folks on HN wanna blame someone or get angry then get angry at the platforms for letting it get to where we are today. it's their own fucking faults.
The "free" internet is there, just the same as before. The proportion of people using it in the way they used to might have changed.
I’m not sure free internet was ever good for us. I didn’t need to see all those beheading videos.
But how do you control what a kid can or cannot follow? They can still follow Andrew Tate and his temu versions
Not that I disagree
The government is an entity that acts to protect itself. It has and always will fear an open and informed public.
if social media companies hadn't made social media a total cesspit of disinformation, child grooming and algorithmic manipulation then the outcome might have been different
Adopting the drug prohibition model is fine, if what we want is to lavishly enrich the social media cartels, and visit upon the rest of the world needless crime, misery, addiction, and death.
The whole appeal of Anarchy is that The State always has the potential to become Evil. So, at a (very quick) first pass - eliminating The State kinda seems like it heads off some bad futures.
While some of the HN commentariat may be anarchists, you and I at least are not.
The idea that this is about surveillance is also interesting.
I think it's important we ask: could we invoke this ban without surveillance?
- identity scan is one solution
But surely there are other solutions? Can't you just make laws that get kids in trouble if they get caught on social media? Kids get in trouble for missing school.. there are other incentives than identify checks, surely?
IOW its a coordination problem. You need most of the other parents in your social group to also implement those controls.
I imagine that many parent don’t want micromanage their kids apps, this takes care of the problem.
Kids find ways around everything. Even adults find the 'digital wellbeing' tools on Android and iOS useless. Just look at the multitude of apps available for digital self regulation these days (ScreenZen, Freedom, BlockSite, etc). No single solution works for everybody at the moment.
Regulation by itself is also insufficient. But maybe combining regulation with parental controls plus other measures will be effective. A 'defense in depth' or swiss cheese strategy, with multiple layers of protection.
I do hope we figure out what layers are needed soon, though. It feels like we're running out of time.
One campaign I’ve liked is one in the UK to try and get the parents of whole year groups in school to agree to not buy phones until their children are a certain age. This removes a lot of the peer pressure of ‘my friends all have one’.
> It feels like we're running out of time.
I mean, does it? It feels like we’re running guns blazing into something that will be trivially bypassable (hello free VPN to some random European country - remember Hola?).
The government shouldn't be parenting other parents kids
Australia already did. Commonwealth countries share a lot in common, and of course a lot of problems are common across many countries.
But let's be real -- these countries are announcing it in lockstep because the US is a corrupt plutocracy, and the lords of the nation like Mark Zuckerberg will run to Trump and he'll have a little tantrum (tantrums that always, it should be mentioned, just hurt Americans more. Everything is in the service of the billionaire class) about this.
It's tougher for that grifter to do so if so many countries do it simultaneously.
>The idea that this is about surveillance is also interesting.
What idea is that? That firms from foreign nations will gather IDs, of absolutely zero value for the country, to ensure age compliance? How does this silly conspiracy work?
Kids motivated will just get around it. But I think it's pretty clear at this point, given the idiocracies rising worldwide and how everything is getting stupider/worse, that social media has not been a net good.
Big tech will act inconvenienced but they will in reality benefit
Just like any attempt by a UK Gov to fix housing: they just make it worse, because that was the real aim (yes I include the latest renter's rights legislation)
It's not ideal in many senses (what age checks are we talking about here) but its worth thinking about some of the positive effects this might have on the young people growing up in the mess we've made of new media.
Aided by their parents, I'm sure, they will find seedier ways to do this. Ways that are not regulated at all, even by sensible laws that prevent direct exploitation. The parents obviously don't care that their kids use social media, otherwise they would take steps to stop it.
These laws are not going to bring back the days where we all were riding our bikes outside and reading physical books. That's not the way of life for these kids. But it's, very likely, going to put children in a more dangerous situation as they try to find some kind of solution to their social needs online.
It’s very possible that a policy like this could give everyone a new Schelling point to coordinate around, and thus change the default behavior.
We will see! I certainly agree this policy won’t prevent the kids that really want to use an app.
- Select 3rd parties friends of government officials will be taxpayer funded to verify government ID's and live facial recognition.
- Said data will be "accidentally leaked" and somehow a myriad of 3rd parties and criminals end up with this data.
- People will be encouraged to purchase some form of identity protection monitoring service.
- People will conclude or theorize that all of this could have been avoided.
I have some ideas that could solve this without impacting anyone currently using the internet but there are no financial incentives for government officials to participate thus such ideas are dead in the water.
(NB it'll start off at a lower figure)
His response would have been "go to hell", and he would have figured out a way to get around it anyways. Unless they're actually planning to track one government ID per person in a database, a truly horrifying idea that this project is slippery sloping towards (because if the current design is easily defeatable, then why do it at all?)
Having access to the entire internet, warts and all, as a kid did not ruin my life, it was an escape from the people I did not fit in with in the place I grew up, it taught me about humanity and ultimately led to a successful career for me.
Dave Bohnett, the founder of Geocities, stuck his neck out to protect the LGBT section of the site so that young adults could find a place to have community despite often growing up in places where it was dangerous to be gay, like it was for him when he grew up in a very conservative suburb of Chicago.
I don't think anyone has said more negative stuff about Facebook then I have, and I literally made a platform eager to try to destroy it, but this is not the way to do it. We should be thinking very, very carefully about when we let the government become our parents in scenarios like this when the unintended consequences seem quite likely be enormous and when there's no mechanism for retracting the law once it's implemented and we find out that, surprise surprise, it didn't magically cure depression in young adults.
Personally, the strongest positive evidence I've seen comes from the natural experiments tracking when high speed internet & phones were introduced geographically. Rates of teen depression do seem to topple in very close sync with this, as discussed here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
Parents will just scan the kids in.
Limited success might be a better term. But if a supposedly blanket ban only stopped 30% of under-16s accounts from accessing social media, that does seem pretty failure-esque.
Presumably you wouldn't call laws against murder a failure because there are murders.
And completely against it actually meaning strong identification of over 16s.
Quebec has it, too. IMO it should be banned for under-18s instead of under-16s.
The only problem is how to enforce it.
I'm sick of this government, they won't be getting my vote in the next GE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUep-4v_M9k
I still believe that the government should ban unsolicited algorithmic content (so search engines are exempted), but this is a second best option.
Then perhaps comes the mark which is about restricting and controlling what you're allowed to buy and sell.
(answer: https://ash.org.uk/resources/view/use-of-e-cigarettes-among-... )
Edit: as your own source conclude
- Nudging, propaganda, posters and automated announcements
- New legislation to ban something
If something can't be fixed with either of those, nothing gets fixed. Shockingly this happens a lot!
Their mates will make some money and lobbyists appeased, then they'll get distracted about what to ban and clutch pearls over next, and the issues our children have will persist and get worse
It's very obviously not about the children.