This is my humble opinion, but such a coordinated action from the governments around the world at this particular time has a certain smell. It smells like they're worried about losing governmental narrative control. It could be about foreign powers, but tech nowadays allows regular people to contest power from the government so they become a target as well. AI, the internet, anonymity/cryptography, a probable war with china and/or russia, all exacerbate this worry.
In short, governments want to retain control and prepare for the future, and to retain control they need to control the flow of information and they need to have a monopoly on information. To achieve this they need an intelligence strategy that puts common people at the center (spying on them) and put restrictions in place. But they can't say this outloud because in the current era it's problematic, so the children become a good excuse.
This is particularly clear in governments that don't care about political correctness or are not competent enough to disguise their intentions. Such an example is the Argentine government, which these years passed laws to survey online activity and to put it's intelligence agency to spy on "anyone that puts sovereign narrative and cohesion at risk".
This isn’t the product of shadowy government figures meeting together and plotting to take over the internet. It’s an obvious byproduct of the current moral panic around social media.
Just look at the HN comments. There are people welcoming this level of government control and using famous moral panic topics to justify it, like Andrew Tate or TikTok.
Yes, but when moral panic reaches the ears and minds of people in government, who see government as the solution to every problem and don't tend to think much about limits to their own power (I'm a good guy with good intentions, why would you want to limit me?), this is the type of solution you tend to get.
If democratic outputs can be sufficiently controlled via media that is for sale, then you already have a de-facto plutocracy.
Similarly, allowing foreign interests a significant media presence (and control) in your country is a very real threat to the basic principles of a democratic nation.
Who do you think is responsible for the current moral panic around social media?
That shit didn't just happen. Social media only became ontologically evil once it presented a threat to the status quo by allowing the underclasses to organize and establish political power, and when it started to undermine mainstream propaganda narratives.
It's no coincidence that TikTok is being described as a CCP weapon of war and indoctrination when it starts leading people to question their government's foreign policy and capitalism. Can't have that.
So your theory is that a single, coherent actor ("deep state"?) is responsible for current public sentiment that is both somewhat critical of social media and specifically foreign control of that media? I disagree on that.
In a democracy, if you gave full control over local media to a foreign nation, do you see how that could lead to problems, or would you be fine with that?
TikTok being owned by a Chinese company didn't represent "giving full control over local media to a foreign nation."
And it's weird that you mistrust the influence of something as banal as TikTok but apparently believe the moral panic around social media and TikTok specifically is entirely organic. Because I guess there is no such thing as propaganda or influence operations on Western social media?
If you're worried about foreign influence on social media literally every Western platform is being aggressively manipulated by both foreign and Western intelligence. It just got revealed that most of the MAGA accounts on Twitter were foreign, likely Russian-based networks. The platform that serves as the de facto psychological operations and communications channel for the current Presidental administration.
But it's just TikTok and the Chinese mind control we should worry about?
I'm absolutely not saying that there is no western propaganda. But giving control over your media to any single actor (especially sovereign ones) is basically suicide for a democracy because it allows those actors to "democratically" achieve results against voter interests.
Politicians having control over media is always a problem, but it got much worse thanks to inherent centralization of modern media, so more regulatory pushback is needed now than in the newspaper age. I'd also argue that foreigners having media control is typically worse because incentives are even less aligned with voters.
I think the problem you lay out is interesting. Back when the Arab Spring was brand new, the narrative was something like "Twitter has finally given power to the people, and once they had power they overthrew their evil dictatorships."
A decade and some time later, my personal opinion would be that the narrative reads something like this: "access to social media increases populism, extremism, and social unrest. It's a risk to any and all forms of government. The Arab dictatorships failed first because they were the most brittle."
To the extent that you agree with my claim, it would mean that even a beneficent government would have something to fear from social media. As with the Arab Spring, whatever comes after the revolution is often worse than the very-imperfect government which came before.
> To the extent that you agree with my claim, it would mean that even a beneficent government would have something to fear from social media
I'd say that governments are beneficial to the extent that they adapt to the people they're governing. It's clear that social media poses a grave danger to current governance. But that doesn't mean that all forms of governance are equally attacked.
My belief is that the current governance is just obsolete and dying because of the pace of cultural and technical innovation. Governments will need to change in order to stay beneficial to people, and the change is to adapt to people instead of making the people adapt to the current governance.
> access to social media increases populism, extremism, and social unrest.
I don't think this is necessarily a byproduct of social media, itself. But rather, the byproduct of algorithmic engagement farming social media that capitalizes on inciting negative emotions for retention. Which, I concede, is all of the large ones.
I'm sure, also, that some amount of cause will also be concern of foreign adversaries using social media to sway young people against their government as well. Since they're easier to influence than your typical adult.
>But rather, the byproduct of algorithmic engagement farming social media that capitalizes on inciting negative emotions for retention.
Very fair, and I use the interchangeably. In principle you could have (and we have previously had) social media without this sort of algorithmic or virality features.
> Counterpoint: Sufficient media control kills a democracy because it enables you to control public sentiment and election outcomes.
That's just as true when the entity seizing control is the government, such that the entity that control public sentiment and election outcomes is the incumbent administration.
Absolutely. A quite typical way for dictatorships to consolidate power.
But the question is how much this applies, especially in most western states; there is a huge spectrum between having some government-determined regulation (or funding) for media and a single individual politician being in full control of all media content.
I'd argue that Turkey/Hungary or past-Italy under Berlusconi were all much farther along that spectrum than most western nations right now, US included.
Maybe. But the thing is that I think there is a legitimate cultural need to minimize mass exposure to these centralized social media platforms. And I think people realised this about now.
I don't advocate legal bans. And people need to stop using it. The risk is great that there will be legal overreach ...
I'd rather my government control the narrative my children are exposed to than Andrew Tate.
Edit: To expand, this is not just a flippant remark. People ignore Andrew Tate because he's so obviously, cartoonishly awful, but they are not the audience. It's aimed at children, and from personal experience its effect on a large number of them worldwide is profound, to the extent that I worry about the long term, generational effect.
Children will be exposed to narratives one way or another, and to want to (re)assert some control that over that isn't necessarily just an authoritatian power play.
The targets to control are not children. They don't need to be controlled, from an intelligence point of view. Government's attention is not infinite, and between worries of losing power and worries about the wellbeing of children, one of the two is the winner, and it's not the children. If children's well-being was the priority, you would see other stuff being made.
This sort of makes sense if our governments are, on the whole, 'better' than Andrew Tate, for some definition of 'better'. But as the slide goes on there will be a tipping point where our governments are worse, meaning them surveilling me becomes problematic. Best shout about it now than then.
Counterpoint: Andrew Tate resonates with the younger generations because modern society (at least in the UK) appears to be an ever-growing middle finger to them and Tate promises a (fake, but believable) way out.
When your future looks like endless toil just so you can give half of the fruits of your labor to subsidize senile politicians/their friends (via taxes) and the other half to subsidize boomers (via rent), Tate's messaging and whatever get-rich-quick scheme he's currently hawking sounds appealing.
You can ban Tate but without solving the reason behind why people look up to him it's just a matter of time before another grifter takes his place.
Casual calls for banning children from social media are becoming common, even here on HN. The people demanding these bans always assume that the bans will cleanly apply only to sites they don’t use or don’t like, as if only Facebook and TikTok will be impacted.
This proposed amendment shows exactly why this entire concept is problematic. The definition of social media site is this:
> by regulations made my statutory instrument require all regulated user-to-user services to use highly-effective age assurance measures to prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users.
Now imagine all of the user-to-user services you use on the internet: Hacker News, Discord, Signal, any messaging app, the comment section on your favorite news websites. Even Wikipedia is a user-to-user website.
The second point that people calling for heavy regulation neglect is that the only way to keep under-16s out of these websites is to enforce age verification on everyone who visits the website. So HN would require ID verification, and Discord, and your messaging apps. I always see ideas about creating age verification services that don’t disclose ID information, but a key part of age verification is confirming (as reasonably possible) that the person presenting the ID with the age on it is the same person who is trying to use the service. The same reason a 16 year old can’t walk into a liquor store with their mom’s ID is going to be applied to these age checks, requiring that the sites make an effort to associate an ID with the user. Otherwise, kids are smart and will borrow their parents or older friends’ IDs or even use online black market services if there are no negative consequences for sharing IDs that perform anonymous age checks. Associating IDs with user accounts is a key part of age check legislation.
It's a coordination problem. I can "parent" my kids by banning them from social media sure, but if the other parents don't also do that, then I just made my kid a social outcast.
As it is we have to allow our eldest a lot more screen and social media time than we think is healthy, but it's more healthy than not having any friends.
I'm not necessarily in favour of a government ban, but I do wish more parents were on board. At the primary school (age 10) 100% of other kids had phones, and no one else seemed to give a shit.
I'm not sure why we give kids smart phones and laptops. This is actually unavoidable. Your school will give your kid a laptop, even if you prohibit it at home. Imagine being 14 and having an entire laptop to prevent you from ever needing to focus in class. I never would have managed it.
> Imagine being 14 and having an entire laptop to prevent you from ever needing to focus in class.
Depends on the school obviously, but at my 15 year old's school they default to their laptops staying in their bag and only get them out for specific tasks when directed by the teacher. The rest of the time the laptop is in their bag. They don't just sit there staring at a laptop during every lesson and goofing around on the Internet.
Also all of these school provided laptops have pretty extensive keylogging/etc installed. The laptops are not provided for personal use and the school picks up pretty quickly on any student browsing websites they shouldn't be looking at or typing things they really shouldn't be typing, even when at home and not on the school's wifi. The students are all aware of this and cope quite well.
Leaving it in the bag sounds really reasonable. I'm not really worried about _where_ a kid goes on his laptop. Even if all you had was wikipedia that would be way more interesting than what you were being taught in your lecture. It's the opportunity for distraction here which is what I'm worried about rather than what the kid actually does online. (social media is its own problem, but I'm not addressing that here)
Kids get ChromeOS and learn how to navigate their school's UI. They're not learning computing. They're given a math question which could have been on a piece of paper or in book.
This seems like a really narrow perspective on kids' use of computers in schools, but even if that's the case, it seems to me the solution might be to... teach them computing, not take it away. Or, we might recognize that there's lots of technology we don't learn the ins-and-outs of and yet that are fundamental to our lives, even if we could technically get by without it
Anyway, I would think that having a simple, locked-down OS at school is preferable than having a laptop on which they can do whatever they want, at least to the issue of being distracted in class.
Also, a related comment points out that not all is doom-and-gloom - surprisingly, schools can actually implement sane usage restrictions for laptops in class.
>Anyway, I would think that having a simple, locked-down OS at school is preferable than having a laptop on which they can do whatever they want, at least to the issue of being distracted in class.
This may be true, but even more preferable than this would be no laptop.
if you're a parent and you don't want your kids to do something, the answer is to supervise them. should hot stoves and sharp knives require inserting an ID for age verification?
It's hyperbolic, sure, but the broad point that there are things that parents find hard to parent for reasons, and society should think about helping them out, is 100% true.
I always find it ironic when people complain about social media on social media, drawing some arbitrary line on what is social media (implied to be bad) and what is not (implied to be good).
I would also add GitHub and StackOverflow to the list of social media, they have user-to-user interaction and a visible reputation system with gamification. Stretch things a bit and you could even include email. IRC and USENET too of course.
The only time I have seen something sensible was is I think a proposal in a US state, where the social media the ruling is about is clearly defined. I think it has to have user interaction, a personalized algorithmic feed, and a number of specific patterns, such as infinite scroll, essentially Facebook, TikTok, Instagram,... but not Reddit or Hacker News. The good think about that is that the social media in question could "work around" the ruling by stripping off some dark patterns, I would consider it a win should it happen.
Because it gives governments authority to pick and choose which sites to ban or allow, it’s a mechanism that can accommodate political coercion and subterfuge. The platforms can now be de-platformed.
It’s no longer user-to-user websites, its user-to government-to-user.
If every website needed verification, why not simply move the verification to the device or ISP level? This seems like an authoritative move to track users across websites, and another good reason to keep using a VPN.
Certainly a terrifying amount of responsibility and upkeep for each individual website. If the UK wishes to establish this and not want it to lead to an insane amount of privacy leaks, it should consider developing a technology that makes it work in a privacy-respecting way, like the European Age Verification Solution [0]'s Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
> the UK wishes to establish this and not want it to lead to an insane amount of privacy leaks, it should consider developing a technology that makes it work in a privacy-respecting way
They don’t care about the privacy aspect.
A key part of effective age verification is associating an identity with the account. They don’t just want to confirm that the person accessing the site has access to an ID of anyone who is 16+, they want to make an effort to associate the ID with the account. It’s the same reason why when you present an ID to buy alcohol they look at the photo to make sure the ID is actually yours, not just that you have an ID of someone older in your possession.
Even if we keep it at the website level, a government-run solution that allows you to verify your age without revealing your identity would be the logical solution. There is no good reason why they need to know who I am to know how old I am. The EU seems to be headed that way. The UK doesn't seem to care, almost as if associating real names with accounts was the whole point and saving children was just a convenient excuse for them
This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance.
In the same sense one could argue that social media like Facebook or WhatsApp should be banned among older population because that's one of the major ways mis/fake information being spread among elderly people and now with AI videos they actually believe those fake stories to be 100% true as well. I think that's more risk to modern day democracy and well being of the society in general.
In theory, libertarian-type approaches seem reasonable when you model for cooperative actors. In practice, however, you hit tragedies of the commons and severe first-mover disadvantages. Well-meaning parents who ban teenagers from social media at the level of the family rather than at the level of society will mainly just socially ostracize their kids. I'd imagine you'd need to go Amish-mode and build a social network on behalf of your kids for anything like this to work.
If you want to restrict kids from social media (which is an open question), I would much prefer that the laws not gate kids from social media directly as this would require social media websites to ask for ID. Rather, abusive parents who don't lock their kids out of social media websites should be sanctioned. First offenders get all of their Internet accesses taken down for a few months.
If you have been a teenager or adult before, you will be familiar with the concept of the clique. For teens, there are athletes, nerds, theater kids, Lululemon kids, etc.
There are cliques of kids who do not use social media (because their parents won't let them, or they don't want to, or they prefer to do something else, or their parents do not use social media, or they cannot afford the devices). Teens who do not use social media sort into different cliques. That's it. They are not ostracized any more than theater kids or computer geeks are ostracized. (The latter inclusion was intentional, as it may cause some self-reflection among well-adjusted adults who at one time were members of school computer clubs.)
Fairly recent teen here. This is simply not true. All my friends who started adamantly against social media had Instagram come end of senior year. At college, I could count on one hand the amount of people I met without it.
I know personally, I was never entirely without social media, but I switched to iPhone because I was so tired of being ostracized with regard to iMessage (this was pre-RCS, perhaps this particular concern has been alleviated)
Sure I guess all the Android users could band together and form a clique and maybe that happened to some extent, but I didn’t wish to associate as an Android user. I don’t imagine kids want “social media Luddite” to be their clique. I wanted to be an outdoorsy kid with tech interests at the most. My choice of phone brand isn’t a part of this identity.
Noted. We have granted an exception for iMessage on the grounds that communications are primarily/wholly with people known IRL.
There's an analogy for older folks, which is kids who grew up without TVs (and radio, in some cases). I am friends with a number of such folks, and they are just fine. I would imagine they too were "ostracized" because they were largely disconnected from pop culture. I imagine they didn't like the situation when they were younger, but it did not damage them like people suggest will happen to kids without access to Instagram.
(Noting also here that as early as tweens, the kids have been using all kinds of stuff as social media sites. Obviously Google Docs etc. But also any unblocked site on the Internet with a textbox, including Asana, Monday, etc. Anywhere with an image upload can be social media.)
> At college, I could count on one hand the amount of people I met without it.
I'm in the US, will say that most students here are over the age of 16 by the time they arrive at college so this would not apply to them.
Would love to get your thoughts on people who "have" social media vs people who abuse (or whatever you want to call it) social media. Is this like cigarettes, where having an account is too much, or more like sweets that can be enjoyed in moderation?
We absolutely do need regulation of this harm by the law. It's how we stand together as a society, otherwise one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents. There's plenty of precedent in other threshold ages at which children can start indulging in other potentially harmful vices.
The vulnerable elder population is more difficult to define by a simple age threshold. We all decline at different ages and different rates.
> one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents.
So what is wrong with that? parenting is not equal among all parents in UK and why should only this aspect be normalized?
> The vulnerable elder population is more difficult to define by a simple age threshold. We all decline at different ages and different rates.
This is a hypocritical statement. For children we are more than willing to normalize and enforce rules as us adults wants because we assume all children grow up at same age and same rates, but when it comes to policing adults, the line is gray and more difficult because everyone is different.
The parent in your conversation is just stupid and no matter how many laws we pass we cannot fix stupidity.
In that case only thing I can suggest is to pass a law to assess the eligibility and maturity of people if they want to have children and issue a permit if they are suitable to have and raise children and otherwise they cannot have children.
> There's plenty of precedent in other threshold ages at which children can start indulging in other potentially harmful vices.
Yeah but, there's no precedent for regulating something that parents are opting into (by buying their kids devices and then turning them loose with no oversight).
We should be punishing liquor stores when a parent willingly buys their child alcohol, then?
> one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents
That’s how it has been for most everything. Someone else’s parents let their kids watch TV on a school night, or stay up past 10pm, or has a curfew of 1am instead of midnight, or lets them drink soda at the dinner table. The response from my parents to me, and from me to my kids, has always been to point out that families are different, they have different rules, and that in this house we do X.
Driving on public roads is prohibited until a certain age.
That age is 17 here in the UK but me and many of my friends growing up in a rural area learned to drive from the age of 14 or 15 on private land. Our parents would take us there/back, provide the car and be our "instructor". Some friends who lived on farms had cars/trucks/etc of their own that they could use to drive around and their parents were fine to let us try too. But we knew that we were never allowed on public roads.
By the time we all got to 17 we applied for our tests and had a few lessons with an real instructor on real public roads. We still had to learn all of the rules/etiquette/etc but most of us where completely happy with the physical aspects of controlling the vehicle, that saved us a huge amount of time.
My kid is 15 and if a suitable opportunity arises I'll let them have a go behind the wheel (not illegally obviously). Unfortunately I live in a city not a rural area, and don't own a car, so there hasn't been the chance yet.
(In the UK land like a supermarket car park is still considered as public roads despite being privately owned. Generally anywhere where the public can access it easily is not considered "private" in terms of the Road Traffic Act.)
Every single right you have can be taken away by the justification of it will protect children or it is wrong because of something some person wrote in a religious text.
Parents who think they need this are bad parents and bad citizens.
Someone pointed out that every single one of these laws in spirit does not need the website to verify and block the user. There is no need for complicated schemes of all websites implementing complex screening software and storing all our IDs. The website could report a single string saying if there is adult content and software the parent or authoritarian governments ISP has installed on the device could block it.
The fact of me being a parent is non of your concern I would say.
If most of voting age parents want this, then what prevents them from enforcing it on their children. Why do they have to rely on government to be the parent. Maybe those parent should not have been parents in the first place if they need government to step in to raise their children.
Why does that mean people who don't want this law's privacy gets to be invaded? How is this not those parents' responsibility to ensure their child doesn't go on those sites they don't like?
I'm a parent of four, and the family controls on Android, paired with sensible oversight of laptop use at home, are perfectly sufficient. We've enabled WhatsApp, but check it every so often for the younger ones; they have a timeout, can use Wikipedia, and have a time limit on their use of AI. They can't use the stupid services like Tiktok.
There is a very simple and powerful alternative; add a flag to the http header standard, which is enforced device-wide or web-browser wide for any parent controlled device.
If you dont want to serve or moderate your site for children and be exposed to fines, you block any request with the relevant flag.
You just need a law to enforce what can be served when using the relevant flag, and some talks with Google, Apple Microsoft and w3 to implement it.
you can even segment it my category; no-login, no-posting, no-18-plus, no-violence, no-politics, under-16, region-EU, region-UK.
This leaves control to parents to do what they deem appropriate for their age, and doesn't turn into a authoritative surveillance state.... wait thats the point isn't it...
Adding even more personal information into HTTP headers is NOT the way to go. The web shouldn't require identification. The web shouldn't require segmentation on protected demographics. The business should. If the goal is to "protect the children", sending this information on every request is ANYTHING BUT protecting the children.
Seems like it could work in the other direction... mandate that adult sites etc. include a standard, relevant flag in the response, so that parental control software can detect it if it's installed. Sites don't have to know anything about their users, parents can reliably filter out naughty sites.
To op's point, age verification is really a surveillance measure, so this won't happen.
The UK in particular seems to be headed into a terrible direction with regard to free speech, being a nanny-state, and surveilling its citizens. I wonder if these sorts of measures (broadly) are supported by their voters or if the voters really have no choice.
Not sure where you are from but it's not exclusive to the UK. People directly quoting the US president following the tragic death of a right wing commentator also found themselves locked up. Not to mention the same president suggesting that people suggesting that the military should refuse illegal orders should be locked up etc.
I think realistically we've grown up in an age where you could say almost anything online, free from any threat of any kind of reprisal. It probably reasonable that, given the internet is key to daily life these days, that we treat it as no different from standing on a park bench and shouting. If you're calling for the death of people based on their religion or some other characteristic then there are consequences to your speech.
Unfortunately the most recent example of this kind of legislation, the laws surrounding age verification on websites, was introduced under a previous government so it really doesn't matter who you vote for on this anyway.
In the UK any topics in regards to politics that are widely spoken about in public is to do with immigration / inflation / housing crisis. Because of these other issues this is happening under the radar and no political party cares.
It is because the vast majority of the people don't understand really what the internet is, how it works and therefore cannot understand the consequences.
However the effects of immigration (both positive and negative), inflation and not being able to afford a house is more easily understood by the layman.
Most people definitely do not understand those things beyond price up or more brown/black people. But they are easier to create narratives around that provoke an emotional response.
Quite a lot of people understand more nuance than you would give them credit for. You are falling for the narrative that most people can't understand these things.
Many just understand complaining about it won't do any good.
I was talking with my Mother last night about this very subject and she is social worker in her 60s.
Exactly. In order to prove you are not 15 online you have to prove you are >=16, even if you are 63.
And there's no "I'm an adult" proof with leaking exactly who you are.
This is thinly veiled "we want to know exactly who is behind every account" legislation. Expect it to be coupled with the usual "If you've nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument.
I am not sure who is going to be interested in the general population amoral interest in a country that is/was OK with well known personal personalities being pedophiles and rags like the mail that will push whatever narratives they feel brings the more dosh.
As a British Citizen I've just decided I don't care what the law is and I will just circumvent any of these laws. The current government have basically told everyone that OSA, Mandatory Digital ID etc. is going to happen whether the electorate like it or not.
I suggest people put their energy to not trying to convince anyone and instead put their energy into protecting themselves and learning how circumvent these measures. People who understand the issues of these ID checks don't need convincing and those that don't you are unlikely to change their mind.
Sooner or later it will become apparent that these laws are unenforceable (via VPNs, Tor or similar tech) and eventually they will be repealed or more likely no enforced like most piracy laws are now. The UK (as well as many of other countries) already lost the war against banning torrent sites (as they are effectively a hydra) and I don't think it get enforced anymore because I can to the big torrent with out issues.
They don’t care whether it can be enforced against who publicly the law is. There are no people who understand any part of this, and they say that it’s enforceable. The goal is not that. They care about normies, not tech people, or criminals.
Nothing could be better for this generation. They would be forced to the real unregulated internet, where nothing is boring and everything is magic and chaos
Whenever anyone invokes ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ it’s almost always an attack on freedom somehow. In this case freedom of speech and anonymity.
If you need kids to verify their age, well they’re going to have to verify the adults too aren’t they.
Which is what they really want.
It isn’t the state’s job to police children - parents should do this. They should just mandate very good easy to use parental controls on devices and spend some money teaching parents how to use them.
It seems like after trying all this time, "Age Assurance/verification" is what is going to stick to end anonymity and an open internet. Under the never-ending banner of "think of the children!"
“All regulated user to user services” could arguably include email, text messaging, and voice calls. Is the goal to make the Internet “adults-only” or just to track everyone and everything? Who gets to decide what is “regulated“? Which grifters get to run the “official” age verification services?
Listen, I get it. The things that "kids these days" are up to is always seen as unholy and dangerous by everyone once they turn 30: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
I'm actually pro the idea of regulating your child's use of technology at the parent level. But giving the tools to government to shut off access to communication for certain groups of people because parenting is hard is such a dangerous precedent to set.
Once the mechanisms and tools to do this are in place, you're one piece of regulation away from removing the idea of privacy altogether and policing all forms of communication. You're forever building the infrastructure to enable 1984, making it super easy to turn on, and hoping the people in power never once abuse it.
All over Europe right now there's some insane things being proposed by domestic politicians. In Denmark, the same people pushing for chat control have proposed a total and complete ban on VPNs.
The impulse to safety is an understandable one in the context of children. But we aren't going to form a successful, independent, and flourishing next generation by hiding them from a huge part of modern life until some arbitrary age, and suddenly unlocking access to it in adulthood.
> one piece of regulation away from removing the idea of privacy altogether and policing all forms of communication. You're building the infrastructure to create 1984.
Politicians attempt this all over Europe, but Britain is trying especially hard, with surprisingly little pushback. Not just the internet, also their state-run and state-accessible CCTV networks, now even with face detection. The idea of giving up privacy for the greater good is surprisingly normalized in the UK
I don't think it's a coincidence that 1984 is set in England and was written by an Englishman
Why are so many parents completely OK with abdicating responsibility like this? Dealing with peer pressure and adolescence is something every parent needs to figure out how to do, sans governmental intervention.
In many European countries, parents have already handed the majority of their child raising duties to the state.
If your kid is in state-subsidized daycare from 8am-5pm every day and bedtime is at 730pm, your child is effectively interfacing with and being entirely raised by a life setup by the state for bulk processing far more than any bespoke one setup by you as a parent.
When you've already distanced your involvement so much, it's only natural these same people would want to remove additional parenting duties off their plate so they can further lead a fully automated life devoid of responsibility or anything uncomfortable like setting limits for your child. Because who wants to take care of their children or their parents? Yuck. Let the immigrant brown people do it while we simultaneously scapegoat them for our own economic failings.
In short, governments want to retain control and prepare for the future, and to retain control they need to control the flow of information and they need to have a monopoly on information. To achieve this they need an intelligence strategy that puts common people at the center (spying on them) and put restrictions in place. But they can't say this outloud because in the current era it's problematic, so the children become a good excuse.
This is particularly clear in governments that don't care about political correctness or are not competent enough to disguise their intentions. Such an example is the Argentine government, which these years passed laws to survey online activity and to put it's intelligence agency to spy on "anyone that puts sovereign narrative and cohesion at risk".
Just look at the HN comments. There are people welcoming this level of government control and using famous moral panic topics to justify it, like Andrew Tate or TikTok.
People and especially kids drink too much soda but I don't think bans are appropriate.
If democratic outputs can be sufficiently controlled via media that is for sale, then you already have a de-facto plutocracy.
Similarly, allowing foreign interests a significant media presence (and control) in your country is a very real threat to the basic principles of a democratic nation.
That shit didn't just happen. Social media only became ontologically evil once it presented a threat to the status quo by allowing the underclasses to organize and establish political power, and when it started to undermine mainstream propaganda narratives.
It's no coincidence that TikTok is being described as a CCP weapon of war and indoctrination when it starts leading people to question their government's foreign policy and capitalism. Can't have that.
In a democracy, if you gave full control over local media to a foreign nation, do you see how that could lead to problems, or would you be fine with that?
And it's weird that you mistrust the influence of something as banal as TikTok but apparently believe the moral panic around social media and TikTok specifically is entirely organic. Because I guess there is no such thing as propaganda or influence operations on Western social media?
If you're worried about foreign influence on social media literally every Western platform is being aggressively manipulated by both foreign and Western intelligence. It just got revealed that most of the MAGA accounts on Twitter were foreign, likely Russian-based networks. The platform that serves as the de facto psychological operations and communications channel for the current Presidental administration.
But it's just TikTok and the Chinese mind control we should worry about?
Politicians having control over media is always a problem, but it got much worse thanks to inherent centralization of modern media, so more regulatory pushback is needed now than in the newspaper age. I'd also argue that foreigners having media control is typically worse because incentives are even less aligned with voters.
A decade and some time later, my personal opinion would be that the narrative reads something like this: "access to social media increases populism, extremism, and social unrest. It's a risk to any and all forms of government. The Arab dictatorships failed first because they were the most brittle."
To the extent that you agree with my claim, it would mean that even a beneficent government would have something to fear from social media. As with the Arab Spring, whatever comes after the revolution is often worse than the very-imperfect government which came before.
I'd say that governments are beneficial to the extent that they adapt to the people they're governing. It's clear that social media poses a grave danger to current governance. But that doesn't mean that all forms of governance are equally attacked.
My belief is that the current governance is just obsolete and dying because of the pace of cultural and technical innovation. Governments will need to change in order to stay beneficial to people, and the change is to adapt to people instead of making the people adapt to the current governance.
I don't think this is necessarily a byproduct of social media, itself. But rather, the byproduct of algorithmic engagement farming social media that capitalizes on inciting negative emotions for retention. Which, I concede, is all of the large ones.
I'm sure, also, that some amount of cause will also be concern of foreign adversaries using social media to sway young people against their government as well. Since they're easier to influence than your typical adult.
Very fair, and I use the interchangeably. In principle you could have (and we have previously had) social media without this sort of algorithmic or virality features.
A democracy that yields sufficient media control to (single) individuals, corporations or foreign nations is basically commiting suicide.
That's just as true when the entity seizing control is the government, such that the entity that control public sentiment and election outcomes is the incumbent administration.
But the question is how much this applies, especially in most western states; there is a huge spectrum between having some government-determined regulation (or funding) for media and a single individual politician being in full control of all media content.
I'd argue that Turkey/Hungary or past-Italy under Berlusconi were all much farther along that spectrum than most western nations right now, US included.
I don't advocate legal bans. And people need to stop using it. The risk is great that there will be legal overreach ...
Edit: To expand, this is not just a flippant remark. People ignore Andrew Tate because he's so obviously, cartoonishly awful, but they are not the audience. It's aimed at children, and from personal experience its effect on a large number of them worldwide is profound, to the extent that I worry about the long term, generational effect.
Children will be exposed to narratives one way or another, and to want to (re)assert some control that over that isn't necessarily just an authoritatian power play.
When your future looks like endless toil just so you can give half of the fruits of your labor to subsidize senile politicians/their friends (via taxes) and the other half to subsidize boomers (via rent), Tate's messaging and whatever get-rich-quick scheme he's currently hawking sounds appealing.
You can ban Tate but without solving the reason behind why people look up to him it's just a matter of time before another grifter takes his place.
This proposed amendment shows exactly why this entire concept is problematic. The definition of social media site is this:
> by regulations made my statutory instrument require all regulated user-to-user services to use highly-effective age assurance measures to prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users.
Now imagine all of the user-to-user services you use on the internet: Hacker News, Discord, Signal, any messaging app, the comment section on your favorite news websites. Even Wikipedia is a user-to-user website.
The second point that people calling for heavy regulation neglect is that the only way to keep under-16s out of these websites is to enforce age verification on everyone who visits the website. So HN would require ID verification, and Discord, and your messaging apps. I always see ideas about creating age verification services that don’t disclose ID information, but a key part of age verification is confirming (as reasonably possible) that the person presenting the ID with the age on it is the same person who is trying to use the service. The same reason a 16 year old can’t walk into a liquor store with their mom’s ID is going to be applied to these age checks, requiring that the sites make an effort to associate an ID with the user. Otherwise, kids are smart and will borrow their parents or older friends’ IDs or even use online black market services if there are no negative consequences for sharing IDs that perform anonymous age checks. Associating IDs with user accounts is a key part of age check legislation.
As it is we have to allow our eldest a lot more screen and social media time than we think is healthy, but it's more healthy than not having any friends.
I'm not necessarily in favour of a government ban, but I do wish more parents were on board. At the primary school (age 10) 100% of other kids had phones, and no one else seemed to give a shit.
Depends on the school obviously, but at my 15 year old's school they default to their laptops staying in their bag and only get them out for specific tasks when directed by the teacher. The rest of the time the laptop is in their bag. They don't just sit there staring at a laptop during every lesson and goofing around on the Internet.
Also all of these school provided laptops have pretty extensive keylogging/etc installed. The laptops are not provided for personal use and the school picks up pretty quickly on any student browsing websites they shouldn't be looking at or typing things they really shouldn't be typing, even when at home and not on the school's wifi. The students are all aware of this and cope quite well.
I had a laptop in school at that age. I managed it.
If you’ve spent any time in a classroom in the last 5 years you’d know there are some kids who manage it, and lots of kids who absolutely don’t.
Anyway, I would think that having a simple, locked-down OS at school is preferable than having a laptop on which they can do whatever they want, at least to the issue of being distracted in class.
Also, a related comment points out that not all is doom-and-gloom - surprisingly, schools can actually implement sane usage restrictions for laptops in class.
This may be true, but even more preferable than this would be no laptop.
if you're a parent and you don't want your kids to do something, the answer is to supervise them. should hot stoves and sharp knives require inserting an ID for age verification?
It's hyperbolic, sure, but the broad point that there are things that parents find hard to parent for reasons, and society should think about helping them out, is 100% true.
I would also add GitHub and StackOverflow to the list of social media, they have user-to-user interaction and a visible reputation system with gamification. Stretch things a bit and you could even include email. IRC and USENET too of course.
The only time I have seen something sensible was is I think a proposal in a US state, where the social media the ruling is about is clearly defined. I think it has to have user interaction, a personalized algorithmic feed, and a number of specific patterns, such as infinite scroll, essentially Facebook, TikTok, Instagram,... but not Reddit or Hacker News. The good think about that is that the social media in question could "work around" the ruling by stripping off some dark patterns, I would consider it a win should it happen.
It’s no longer user-to-user websites, its user-to government-to-user.
Certainly a terrifying amount of responsibility and upkeep for each individual website. If the UK wishes to establish this and not want it to lead to an insane amount of privacy leaks, it should consider developing a technology that makes it work in a privacy-respecting way, like the European Age Verification Solution [0]'s Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
[0] https://ageverification.dev
They don’t care about the privacy aspect.
A key part of effective age verification is associating an identity with the account. They don’t just want to confirm that the person accessing the site has access to an ID of anyone who is 16+, they want to make an effort to associate the ID with the account. It’s the same reason why when you present an ID to buy alcohol they look at the photo to make sure the ID is actually yours, not just that you have an ID of someone older in your possession.
World governments are going to crack down hard on the free internet over the next century. A distributed solution is sorely needed.
That will turbocharge the draconian lockdown of computing. You will never own a computer you buy every again if that is pushed.
In the same sense one could argue that social media like Facebook or WhatsApp should be banned among older population because that's one of the major ways mis/fake information being spread among elderly people and now with AI videos they actually believe those fake stories to be 100% true as well. I think that's more risk to modern day democracy and well being of the society in general.
If you want to restrict kids from social media (which is an open question), I would much prefer that the laws not gate kids from social media directly as this would require social media websites to ask for ID. Rather, abusive parents who don't lock their kids out of social media websites should be sanctioned. First offenders get all of their Internet accesses taken down for a few months.
Parent of a teen here. This is just flatly false.
If you have been a teenager or adult before, you will be familiar with the concept of the clique. For teens, there are athletes, nerds, theater kids, Lululemon kids, etc.
There are cliques of kids who do not use social media (because their parents won't let them, or they don't want to, or they prefer to do something else, or their parents do not use social media, or they cannot afford the devices). Teens who do not use social media sort into different cliques. That's it. They are not ostracized any more than theater kids or computer geeks are ostracized. (The latter inclusion was intentional, as it may cause some self-reflection among well-adjusted adults who at one time were members of school computer clubs.)
I know personally, I was never entirely without social media, but I switched to iPhone because I was so tired of being ostracized with regard to iMessage (this was pre-RCS, perhaps this particular concern has been alleviated)
Sure I guess all the Android users could band together and form a clique and maybe that happened to some extent, but I didn’t wish to associate as an Android user. I don’t imagine kids want “social media Luddite” to be their clique. I wanted to be an outdoorsy kid with tech interests at the most. My choice of phone brand isn’t a part of this identity.
There's an analogy for older folks, which is kids who grew up without TVs (and radio, in some cases). I am friends with a number of such folks, and they are just fine. I would imagine they too were "ostracized" because they were largely disconnected from pop culture. I imagine they didn't like the situation when they were younger, but it did not damage them like people suggest will happen to kids without access to Instagram.
(Noting also here that as early as tweens, the kids have been using all kinds of stuff as social media sites. Obviously Google Docs etc. But also any unblocked site on the Internet with a textbox, including Asana, Monday, etc. Anywhere with an image upload can be social media.)
> At college, I could count on one hand the amount of people I met without it.
I'm in the US, will say that most students here are over the age of 16 by the time they arrive at college so this would not apply to them.
Would love to get your thoughts on people who "have" social media vs people who abuse (or whatever you want to call it) social media. Is this like cigarettes, where having an account is too much, or more like sweets that can be enjoyed in moderation?
The vulnerable elder population is more difficult to define by a simple age threshold. We all decline at different ages and different rates.
> one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents.
So what is wrong with that? parenting is not equal among all parents in UK and why should only this aspect be normalized?
> The vulnerable elder population is more difficult to define by a simple age threshold. We all decline at different ages and different rates.
This is a hypocritical statement. For children we are more than willing to normalize and enforce rules as us adults wants because we assume all children grow up at same age and same rates, but when it comes to policing adults, the line is gray and more difficult because everyone is different.
In that case only thing I can suggest is to pass a law to assess the eligibility and maturity of people if they want to have children and issue a permit if they are suitable to have and raise children and otherwise they cannot have children.
As they say, you can't fix stupid.
Yeah but, there's no precedent for regulating something that parents are opting into (by buying their kids devices and then turning them loose with no oversight).
We should be punishing liquor stores when a parent willingly buys their child alcohol, then?
That’s how it has been for most everything. Someone else’s parents let their kids watch TV on a school night, or stay up past 10pm, or has a curfew of 1am instead of midnight, or lets them drink soda at the dinner table. The response from my parents to me, and from me to my kids, has always been to point out that families are different, they have different rules, and that in this house we do X.
And that would be a great oportunity to teach that child that those measures exist for a reason.
The government is and must always be a subsidiary actor.
Not every risk must be addressed, otherwise zebra crossings would not exist, or driving would be prohibited.
Driving on public roads is prohibited until a certain age.
That age is 17 here in the UK but me and many of my friends growing up in a rural area learned to drive from the age of 14 or 15 on private land. Our parents would take us there/back, provide the car and be our "instructor". Some friends who lived on farms had cars/trucks/etc of their own that they could use to drive around and their parents were fine to let us try too. But we knew that we were never allowed on public roads.
By the time we all got to 17 we applied for our tests and had a few lessons with an real instructor on real public roads. We still had to learn all of the rules/etiquette/etc but most of us where completely happy with the physical aspects of controlling the vehicle, that saved us a huge amount of time.
My kid is 15 and if a suitable opportunity arises I'll let them have a go behind the wheel (not illegally obviously). Unfortunately I live in a city not a rural area, and don't own a car, so there hasn't been the chance yet.
(In the UK land like a supermarket car park is still considered as public roads despite being privately owned. Generally anywhere where the public can access it easily is not considered "private" in terms of the Road Traffic Act.)
Parents who think they need this are bad parents and bad citizens.
Someone pointed out that every single one of these laws in spirit does not need the website to verify and block the user. There is no need for complicated schemes of all websites implementing complex screening software and storing all our IDs. The website could report a single string saying if there is adult content and software the parent or authoritarian governments ISP has installed on the device could block it.
But protecting children isn't the point
If most of voting age parents want this, then what prevents them from enforcing it on their children. Why do they have to rely on government to be the parent. Maybe those parent should not have been parents in the first place if they need government to step in to raise their children.
If you dont want to serve or moderate your site for children and be exposed to fines, you block any request with the relevant flag.
You just need a law to enforce what can be served when using the relevant flag, and some talks with Google, Apple Microsoft and w3 to implement it.
you can even segment it my category; no-login, no-posting, no-18-plus, no-violence, no-politics, under-16, region-EU, region-UK.
This leaves control to parents to do what they deem appropriate for their age, and doesn't turn into a authoritative surveillance state.... wait thats the point isn't it...
nevermid there is no alternative /j
Adding even more personal information into HTTP headers is NOT the way to go. The web shouldn't require identification. The web shouldn't require segmentation on protected demographics. The business should. If the goal is to "protect the children", sending this information on every request is ANYTHING BUT protecting the children.
To op's point, age verification is really a surveillance measure, so this won't happen.
If you want to send the net neutrality to /dev/null, please, head on.
I think realistically we've grown up in an age where you could say almost anything online, free from any threat of any kind of reprisal. It probably reasonable that, given the internet is key to daily life these days, that we treat it as no different from standing on a park bench and shouting. If you're calling for the death of people based on their religion or some other characteristic then there are consequences to your speech.
Unfortunately the most recent example of this kind of legislation, the laws surrounding age verification on websites, was introduced under a previous government so it really doesn't matter who you vote for on this anyway.
However the effects of immigration (both positive and negative), inflation and not being able to afford a house is more easily understood by the layman.
Many just understand complaining about it won't do any good.
I was talking with my Mother last night about this very subject and she is social worker in her 60s.
And there's no "I'm an adult" proof with leaking exactly who you are.
This is thinly veiled "we want to know exactly who is behind every account" legislation. Expect it to be coupled with the usual "If you've nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument.
I suggest people put their energy to not trying to convince anyone and instead put their energy into protecting themselves and learning how circumvent these measures. People who understand the issues of these ID checks don't need convincing and those that don't you are unlikely to change their mind.
Sooner or later it will become apparent that these laws are unenforceable (via VPNs, Tor or similar tech) and eventually they will be repealed or more likely no enforced like most piracy laws are now. The UK (as well as many of other countries) already lost the war against banning torrent sites (as they are effectively a hydra) and I don't think it get enforced anymore because I can to the big torrent with out issues.
If you need kids to verify their age, well they’re going to have to verify the adults too aren’t they.
Which is what they really want.
It isn’t the state’s job to police children - parents should do this. They should just mandate very good easy to use parental controls on devices and spend some money teaching parents how to use them.
His personal blog is also pretty good - https://neilzone.co.uk/
I'm actually pro the idea of regulating your child's use of technology at the parent level. But giving the tools to government to shut off access to communication for certain groups of people because parenting is hard is such a dangerous precedent to set.
Once the mechanisms and tools to do this are in place, you're one piece of regulation away from removing the idea of privacy altogether and policing all forms of communication. You're forever building the infrastructure to enable 1984, making it super easy to turn on, and hoping the people in power never once abuse it.
All over Europe right now there's some insane things being proposed by domestic politicians. In Denmark, the same people pushing for chat control have proposed a total and complete ban on VPNs.
The impulse to safety is an understandable one in the context of children. But we aren't going to form a successful, independent, and flourishing next generation by hiding them from a huge part of modern life until some arbitrary age, and suddenly unlocking access to it in adulthood.
Politicians attempt this all over Europe, but Britain is trying especially hard, with surprisingly little pushback. Not just the internet, also their state-run and state-accessible CCTV networks, now even with face detection. The idea of giving up privacy for the greater good is surprisingly normalized in the UK
I don't think it's a coincidence that 1984 is set in England and was written by an Englishman
If your kid is in state-subsidized daycare from 8am-5pm every day and bedtime is at 730pm, your child is effectively interfacing with and being entirely raised by a life setup by the state for bulk processing far more than any bespoke one setup by you as a parent.
When you've already distanced your involvement so much, it's only natural these same people would want to remove additional parenting duties off their plate so they can further lead a fully automated life devoid of responsibility or anything uncomfortable like setting limits for your child. Because who wants to take care of their children or their parents? Yuck. Let the immigrant brown people do it while we simultaneously scapegoat them for our own economic failings.