[HN Gopher] Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social medi...
___________________________________________________________________
Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people
under 16
Author : hotdailys
Score : 203 points
Date : 2024-03-26 12:41 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| aNoob7000 wrote:
| The law is going to be shot down quickly if it is an undue burden
| on adults getting access to social media websites and apps.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Doubt. The reigning in of social media companies is one of the
| few issues with overwhelming bipartisan support
| seanhunter wrote:
| I'm not sure the law enshrines a right for adults to have
| burden-free access to social media websites and apps. It would
| be fascinating to be proved wrong about that.
| infamouscow wrote:
| Virtually every tech company has already been sued under
| Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
|
| What makes you think the state law would get struct down in
| federal court?
| setgree wrote:
| I support this in theory, but good luck trying to outmaneuver
| teens on the internet. I foresee a proliferation of age faking
| tools, VPNs, etc.
| edgyquant wrote:
| If you start fining the social media companies for breaking
| this law, this problem will be fixed quickly. Your
| demoralization propaganda is a line perpetuated by these
| companies to avoid responsibility
| bsenftner wrote:
| > If you start fining the social media companies for breaking
| this law, this problem will be fixed quickly.
|
| A rational solution that would work? Can't have that, won't
| have that. Who said this? Stop that person from breathing.
| (sarcasm folks.)
| cpncrunch wrote:
| It's a technical problem that isn't easily solvable though,
| unless facebook outright bans all VPNs.
| repler wrote:
| You may be surprised to learn that when asked, teens would
| actually prefer that everyone give up social media.
|
| The key word is "everyone" and it's a collective action
| problem.
|
| Excellent article in The Atlantic titled "End the Phone Based
| Childhood Now" which covers this extensively.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-...
|
| The study cited in this excellent - but paywalled - article is
| here: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/2023-131/
| Hugsun wrote:
| I forgot about that, that's huge. A bad Nash equilibrium to
| the benefit of tech companies and advertisers and the
| detriment of young people.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| Yup. The actual solution here is regulation requiring social
| media and device manufacturers (networking and user devices
| like phones) to have simple, accessible, and robust parental
| controls.
|
| The law proposed here is a stupid hammer that won't do anything
| but piss everyone off. Definitely what I've come to expect from
| my worthless state government (I live here, I'm sorry, ive
| tried to replace these people several times)
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > The law proposed here is a stupid hammer that won't do
| anything but piss everyone off.
|
| Certainly not _everyone_.
|
| There are many people that back this.
| edgyquant wrote:
| If teens are so so amazing at getting around restrictions why
| do you propose parental controls? No these companies should
| be responsible for not letting teens use their platform just
| as tobacco companies and those selling their products are
| responsible for not selling to teens. We already have
| parental controls and this is a do nothing solution which
| puts the onus on already overwhelmed parents and fixes
| literally nothing.
|
| We're looking for actual solutions here, not to check a box
| and pretend we tried
| michaelt wrote:
| _If they worked,_ a solid set of device parental controls
| would let the parent manage their kid 's usage of social
| media _without_ the privacy risks of doing effective age
| verification.
|
| It'd be a privacy nightmare if everyone ended up sending
| all the major websites a copy of their passport/driving
| license to get access.
|
| And policies like "tick box to confirm you're over 18" are
| a pointless joke.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Probably only a vpn with ip outside Florida required, unless
| they start verifying the age of everyone.
| nemo44x wrote:
| You only have to disrupt them enough to make them useless to
| kids. There needs to be a critical mass of users for the social
| media tool to work. If some kids get through, fine. Liquor
| stores sell kids with fake IDs alcohol sometimes. But most kids
| won't be able to get access making the site more or less
| useless to those that can. Any large enough mass (someone at a
| school distributes to lots of people at the school) will likely
| be detected and destroyed.
| justaman wrote:
| I grew up as social media came into being(mid 2000s). When I was
| 13, I got Myspace. When I was 16, I got Facebook. It wasn't until
| well into college that I realized the impact social media had on
| my mental health. I would go further and say nobody until 18
| should have social media, but that may be unrealistic in 2024.
| capybara_2020 wrote:
| Just curious, how did it affect your mental health?
| justaman wrote:
| I would sit on facebook, refreshing and doom scrolling
| endlessly. When fb messenger came out I was monitoring
| facebook messenger when it first came out to see who was
| online. I was always a pretty lonely kid, and I thought
| social media would connect me with people. It didn't really.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| This reminds me of sitting around on AOL Instant Messenger,
| summer afternoons pre-2000.
|
| Facebook came out when I was in college, and I resisted for
| one semester; then if felt "inevitable" [that I join] since
| almost all classmates were on thefacebook.
|
| ----
|
| At present, I do not carry a cell phone nor use email [it
| is heavenly, a rare gift]. When somebody is more than ten
| minutes late for a planned meetup, I depart.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Setting it to 18 is obviously pretty ridiculous. That's just
| going to continue the weird trend of infantilizing people by
| pushing back the age at which they learn to deal with things
| that require self control.
|
| At 16 there are at least 2 years where parents have the ability
| to actually interfere and help bring any negative effects under
| control.
| skhunted wrote:
| Do you know at what age people are able to properly deal with
| things that require self control? I believe that part of the
| brain doesn't mature until early 20s. At 18 a person is
| legally an adult so 18 seems like a much more reasonable
| cutoff than 16.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| People don't just start being able to deal with things that
| require self control at a specific age. It has to be
| taught. Even sex ed recognizes that, where it's far more
| effective to teach kids how to be safe during it rather
| than to teach them that they can do what they want after
| 18.
|
| If you push off the learning to when the person can legally
| just do whatever they want, all you're doing is abdicating
| parental responsibility and setting the person up for
| addiction as an adult.
| skhunted wrote:
| Yes people should be taught skills to deal with making
| good choices and learning self control. But we don't give
| kids heroin as part of the lesson in learning self
| control. The biological imperative for sex is
| overwhelming and there's not much we can do to stop it.
| There is a way to stop companies from enticing kids with
| social media addiction though.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| We would give them heroin in a controlled manner if the
| consumption of heroin was the primary means of social
| interaction for the majority of adults. The heroin
| analogy is eye catching, but ultimately nothing more than
| idiotic "think of the children"-esque hyperbole.
| skhunted wrote:
| We agree that giving kids access to heroin as a way to
| teach self control is idiotic. What we don't agree on is
| that social media in its current incarnation is heroin
| like. I think it is.
|
| _..heroin was the primary means of social interaction
| for the majority of adults.._
|
| We aren't talking about adults we are talking about kids.
| That the majority of adults use social media for social
| interaction is a separate problem and in no way indicates
| that we should subject kids to something as highly
| addicting and harmful as social media (in its current
| incarnation).
|
| There are tons of studies that show that social media
| harmful to peoples' mental health. It is profoundly dumb
| for society to subject kids to it. In same way it is
| profoundly dumb to let drug companies advertise. People
| are easily manipulated and kids especially so.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| You're forgetting that my argument is that by pushing the
| age of access to social media up to 18 (as the person I
| replied to proposed), we'd be pushing teaching social
| media 'literacy' to when parents lose the tools they have
| to teach their kids. If an 18 year old gets
| debilitatingly addicted to social media, the most they
| can do is threaten to kick them out, which I'm sure you
| can agree isn't really a solution, but if say, a 16 year
| old does that, the parents can take away their phone and
| forcibly disconnect them in various ways until they find
| a healthier balance.
|
| While social media is addictive and unhealthy, it is the
| primary means of social interaction among adults, thus,
| just as we introduce high schoolers to adult things like
| driving, sex, job interviews, citing other's work etc
| through partial exposure to such things (eg junior
| driving permits, sex ed, mock interviews or relaxed
| punishments for academic dishonesty), we should be
| teaching kids how to have a healthy relationship with
| social media through limited exposure BEFORE they turn
| 18.
|
| To this extent, I prefer one of the other suggestions in
| this post, that there should be two 'tiers' of social
| media, kids should still be allowed to access small
| platforms, and in particular, forums. Those are easier to
| monitor for parents and lack many of the ills of more
| 'modern' stream-of-consciousness style social media. As
| an additional point in favor of that approach, forums
| were pretty instrumental to my development of programming
| skills as an early teenager. Without the ability to
| participate on forums, my skills would've been
| considerably stunted.
| skhunted wrote:
| _... we 'd be pushing teaching social media 'literacy' to
| when parents lose the tools they have to teach their
| kids._
|
| There are ways of teaching said literacy without allowing
| unrestricted access to social media. Your last paragraph
| suggest one such way.
|
| It's not an all or nothing type situation. I think it's
| clear the essence of what is being discussed with the
| Florida law is that kids shouldn't be granted
| unrestricted access to social media and those companies
| should be required to enforce access rules to people
| under a certain age.
|
| I believe we are in agreement on this.
| callalex wrote:
| Wait you can buy heroin in Florida if you're over 16?
| skhunted wrote:
| There are some things society thinks people should not be
| allowed to be legally tempted with. Some people think one
| of those things is social media for people under a
| certain age.
| reaperman wrote:
| When people say "the brain is still developing until you're
| 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at learning
| after the age of 25". Noting that, should people learn
| self-control in the presence of social media before 25, or
| after 25?
| skhunted wrote:
| I believe the part of the brian that deals with impulse
| control isn't fully developed until early 20s.
|
| We don't willingly and willfully let kids have access to
| alcohol and heroin. By your reasoning it seems like we
| should so that they can learn self control.
| reaperman wrote:
| I mean a lot of Europe has fairly low age limits for
| purchasing alcohol, and even lower for drinking it in
| private.
|
| I believe 16-year olds can still buy wine and beer at the
| grocery stores in Denmark. I've heard it's fairly common
| for 14-year olds to drink at home in the UK - though the
| 14-to-16 range may be delaying on average since ~2010.
|
| I don't believe many countries allow adults access to
| heroin. I believe prohibition does more harm here due to
| lack of quality control and testing but reasonable minds
| could disagree.
|
| Age of first exposure is a fairly open question across
| the globe. Everyone is experimenting with whats best and
| whats tolerable.
| skhunted wrote:
| We agree then that limiting access to alcohol is
| appropriate at some age level. Different countries do it
| at different ages. What is optimal is society dependent.
|
| I gather then that we are in agreement that limiting
| access to social media is appropriate at some age level.
| We perhaps disagree at what age that ought to occur.
| itishappy wrote:
| Under that framework, we should learn self control as
| early as possible. We learn faster at age 6 than at age
| 16.
| reaperman wrote:
| My Dad taught me how to play video games when I was
| around 6. By "taught", I mean he just let me play, but
| enforced a rule that I'd have to stop playing if I
| couldn't hold an attentive and emotionally appropriate
| conversation with him while I was playing Ninntendo.
|
| This was hard for me! I had a natural instinct to tunnel
| vision into the game and not hear anything anyone was
| saying to me. I'd also get upset at the game and get
| angry in my conversations.
|
| Training this into me at a young age really helped my
| emotional regulation and ability to socialize around /
| during games and not get too sucked into them. This was
| especially important because I was quite ADHD and that
| adds a lot of emotional disregulation.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _When people say "the brain is still developing until
| you're 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at
| learning after the age of 25"._
|
| No, it means that your prefrontal cortex--which is
| involved in a wide range of higher-order cognitive
| functions (planning, decision making, working memory,
| personality expression, moderating social behavior, risk
| processing)--is still developing, so until it does fully
| develop (colloquially at age 25, but it can vary per
| individual), you may lack those skills because you
| physically lack the plumbing for them to be present:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_cortex
|
| * https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.asp
| x?Con...
|
| > _They also found important clues to brain function. For
| instance, a 2016 study found that when faced with
| negative emotion, 18- to 21-year-olds had brain activity
| in the prefrontal cortices that looked more like that of
| younger teenagers than that of people over 21. Alexandra
| Cohen, the lead author of that study and now a
| neuroscientist at Emory University, said the scientific
| consensus is that brain development continues into
| people's 20s._
|
| * https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-
| development-25-ye...
|
| Of course even post-"25" some folks still may lack them
| as well, but at that point there's no longer anything
| _physically_ preventing you from doing so.
| yrds96 wrote:
| I grew up with the birth of the internet and social media and I
| have the opposite feeling. I know that sound the old one
| monologue but I came from the time that social media were
| exclusively social and not a bunch of people creating content
| endlessly in the hope of making tons of money in the internet.
| I used aol, Microsoft Messenger, Facebook and a very famous
| Google social media on my country, called Orkut. None of these
| gave me anxious to see what's happening or any negative
| thoughts. In fact In using the internet and social medja
| learned so many things, meet different people outside of my
| country and from other states and learned about other cultures
| and other languages. All these years and I think the way that
| social media works is rotting people's brain: people barely pay
| attention on you because they are too busy seeing their
| timeline, people even use it on traffic and all of these people
| are adults that doesn't knew about social media until some
| years ago. Internet and Social media for children must be
| supervised and not restricted.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Is there a canonical decision of SCOTUS that children don't have
| First Amendment rights, and therefore it's OK to restrict their
| ability to post?
|
| (note that rules which require proof of age tend also to turn
| into rules that end anonymity, because it's more work to separate
| the proof systems)
|
| Edit: I ask a question about caselaw and end up at -3? Yes, I
| know, don't complain about downvotes, but I don't understand
| these at all.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Yes we already restrict children from doing a ton of things
| e.g. buying or making pornography
| pjc50 wrote:
| Separate question, though - that's particular kinds of
| material (and for some reason US caselaw basically doesn't
| regard anything pornographic as "speech"), while this is a
| blanket restriction.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| If you're 15, you're not allowed in a bar, and you're not
| allowed on a porn site, and you're not allowed to buy
| cigarettes.
|
| The list goes on and on.
|
| I fail to see how not being allowed on Facebook is
| different.
| brk wrote:
| I think the argument is that there are no constitutional
| rights to bars, cigarettes, and porn. Social media is
| being held up as an example of "speech" here, which all
| US citizens are entitled to (at least in theory).
| edgyquant wrote:
| Social media is not "speech" it is a specific type of
| platform which you also do not have a constitutional
| right to.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| The question is whether the venue in which the speech is
| performed in is sufficiently public as to be exempt from
| regulation. Given that participation on these sites
| exposes participants to heavy commercial advertising,
| traffic analysis, and data harvesting, I think it's a
| reasonable stance that the state can regulate
| participation.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| I'm not sure I buy "social media" = "speech". By that
| definition, social media companies shouldn't be able to
| prevent anyone from using their website for any reason.
| Being banned for anything would then be equivalent to
| violating someone's rights to speech.
|
| Social media companies aren't required to give a voice to
| anyone. They are platforms for enabling exercising
| speech, but they aren't speech themselves. This seems
| equivalent to stating that not allowing children in bars
| or strip clubs violates their right to assembly.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Social media isn't controlled by the government though.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| COPPA, a US federal law, has mandated that websites
| operating under US jurisdiction receive parental consent
| prior to collecting online information from children under
| age 13.[1][2]
|
| As far as I'm concerned, this Florida state law practically
| extends it to children age 16 and under specifically with
| regards to social media websites and services.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privac
| y_Prot...
|
| [2]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subcha
| pter-C...
| edgyquant wrote:
| This is not a blanket restriction it is a ban on social
| media which a specific thing. Social media != speech it is
| a product created by a company for profit
| Triphibian wrote:
| Voting.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Driving, buying nicotine/lottery/porn, working, being in
| school, etc.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Looks like Bethel v. Fraser. 478 U.S. 675. 686 (1986) is the
| case you're looking for, in which case the court ruled that a
| school had the right to restrict speech of students
| (specifically to prevent them from swearing I think).
|
| Here's a discussion of US law as it pertains to children that
| you might find interesting.
| https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
|
| "Don't complain about downvotes" I think means what it says.
| Don't complain about them. I have been downvoted when posting a
| correct solution to a persons technical problem before. It
| happens. Take it on the chin and move on.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Technical question about free speech. Do you need to have right
| to see other speech to have free speech? So would it be enough
| for children to be able to post, but not read? As that would
| not violate their free speech.
| nemo44x wrote:
| It's not really a free speech question here. For instance, what
| a student can say in a public school (government tax payer
| funded) can be restricted to a point, but the courts have ruled
| that the 1st amendment still protects kids up to a point here.
| In a private school there are no such protections.
|
| The law here is saying that social media companies are private
| companies and in order to do business with children they need
| to follow certain regulations now. This is perfectly normal and
| legal. For instance, a tavern has certain regulations regarding
| minors entry to them. There are many examples.
| Hugsun wrote:
| Your question assumes that interacting with social media is a
| first ammendment right which I don't think is the case. Not
| sure though. That's likely the reason for the downvotes.
|
| Your comment also has a bit of a "muh free speech" vibe which
| some people dislike.
| newsclues wrote:
| It's a start! Hope this gets studied before it gets shut down.
| karaterobot wrote:
| There's no doubt in my mind that this would be healthier for
| everyone if it panned out. Whether it is legal or enforceable
| remains to be seen.
| margorczynski wrote:
| People might see it as harsh but looking at reality and the hard
| numbers collected about the gigantic negative impact it has on
| kids and teenagers this is the right move, would even push it
| till 18.
| newhotelowner wrote:
| Why 18 and not 25?
| ejb999 wrote:
| because under 18 is not an adult legally speaking, and 18+
| is?
| reaperman wrote:
| Again, not the best argument given that the drinking age is
| 21. Additionally, children can volunteer for the military
| at the age of 16. So there's clearly a range, "legally
| speaking".
|
| Leaning on existing laws isn't really the best for these
| things, because existing laws may be flawed. Would prefer
| to base it on scientific insights, but we don't have much
| relevant for this stuff.
|
| So the real answer is "We don't know, and different states
| will try different ages and see what sticks, what people
| will accept."
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Additionally, children can volunteer for the military
| at the age of 16._
|
| In the US, under 18, only with parental consent.
| reaperman wrote:
| *Unless emancipated, which also often can happen at 16.
| newhotelowner wrote:
| Florida allows 14 years old to work 15 hours.
|
| A lot of states are removing restrictions for under 18
| workers.
|
| Also, drinking age is 21.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I do wonder at what age social media is supposed to stop
| being destructive to mental health. Based on my experience,
| I'm also inclined to think the answer is never, but there's
| too much money to be made to stop it.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or 21 like some drugs...
| itsoktocry wrote:
| Because you have to draw the line somewhere, and 18 is
| considered when someone is capable of their own adult
| decision making.
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| This is the number we've been using recently, but it's been
| different in the past and there's no reason to keep using
| it, especially when we have data showing that 25 is the age
| your decision making faculties are generally fully
| developed
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| When I was a kid the argument was "if you can be drafted
| and sent to war you should be able to vote". The state is
| still going to want those young able bodies for their
| militaries. Raising our age of adulthood to 25 seems
| unlikely to go over very well.
| awkward wrote:
| Because at 18 people are responsible for their own actions,
| and restricting them after that is unreasonable and contrary
| to personal freedom.
|
| There's a consistent factoid going around that brains aren't
| done developing until the age of 25. It's frequently used as
| an argument to restrict young people.
|
| Looking at performance by age in fields like math and music,
| declining brain plasticity seems more like a reason to
| implement the carousel from Logan's Run
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Might as well raise the age of majority to 25, if the brain
| isn't finished developing they're obviously incapable of
| handling personal freedom!
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I'd unironically support raising the voting age in the US
| to 25. I was an idiot when I was 18 and had no business
| picking a leader of any kind.
|
| There's something to be said for waiting until people
| have actual life experience.
| vsnf wrote:
| I have the opposite take you have. There should be no
| restriction on voting age at all. Everyone possesses the
| right to have a say in the direction of the government
| that governs them.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| Riiiight. Because four year olds have a strong grasp on
| current events and deserve a say, and totally wouldn't
| just become an extra vote for whomever their parents are
| voting for.
| vsnf wrote:
| Yep, I understand the practical issues with my position.
| But I can't ethically condone saying "you have no voice"
| to a fellow citizen, so I prefer no restrictions.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| I can't ethically say that policy should be decided by
| people whose primary concern is the frequency of nap and
| snack time.
| jl6 wrote:
| There are plenty of unethical outcomes available in the
| "let babies vote" scenario, to weigh against the
| allegedly-unethical scenario of having a voting age.
| vsnf wrote:
| Indeed there are. There are many hills I'll die on, and
| while this isn't one of them, I do find it deeply
| uncomfortable to so clearly deny a whole category of
| citizens representation.
| jl6 wrote:
| Why so uncomfortable though? We routinely stop children
| doing all kinds of things, for exactly the same reason
| (lack of maturity in decision-making).
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Maybe that's an opportunity to reevaluate those
| restrictions rather than make the argument that because
| restrictions exist that one is as good as another.
|
| It's about as logical as saying, "we put people in jail,
| therefore it's ok that you go to jail." The nuance and
| reasoning is the point.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| Alright let's do that. Is disallowing children from
| driving vehicles or purchasing and consuming alcohol a
| bad idea?
|
| My conclusion: No. Children should not be able to do
| those things. Therefore, there are likely other things
| they should not be allowed to do.
|
| I honestly can't believe we're even having this
| discussion.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I can't believe we're _not_ having this discussion.
|
| The driving example is a bit disingenuous because, in the
| US at least, driving isn't conceptualized as a "right" -
| it's formulated as a privilege. The drinking example is
| closer, but that's the right to self-determination. I
| don't suspect that you believe children have zero self-
| determination, nor do I suspect that you believe that one
| person's right to vote should be based on everyone in a
| particular class.
|
| It would be unconscionable to say, "Women shouldn't be
| allowed to vote because some women can't make good
| decisions." I simply extend the same unconscionablity to
| children.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| > "Women shouldn't be allowed to vote because some women
| can't make good decisions."
|
| I of course disagree with that statement, but it would
| imply that some women _can_ make good decisions.
|
| To carry that back to the original argument, you are
| implying there are children out there who are capable of
| participating in political discourse.
|
| I disagree.
|
| It's starting to feel a bit like I'm feeding the trolls
| here, so I'll let this be my final reply. Have a good
| day.
| jl6 wrote:
| That's not the argument. The argument is: restrict
| children from voting due to their lack of maturity in
| decision-making.
|
| We apply this argument in all kinds of cases that are
| super-uncontroversial so it's surprising to hear that it
| makes someone uncomfortable in this particular case.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| If lack of maturity predicates voting, then we're
| inconsistently disenfranchising individuals within
| classes. That doesn't seem very fair and I don't really
| buy feasibility as an excuse. "Sorry, but it's not
| practically feasible to give you the rights you deserve,"
| is beyond the moral pale.
| itishappy wrote:
| We have laws about how our elders with Alzheimer's and
| dementia vote, but self-sufficient 17 year olds have no
| say in how their lives will be managed for the next 4
| years. There's nuance you're glossing over.
| jl6 wrote:
| Unless you're going to allow babies to vote, we have to
| draw the line somewhere. It's also not true that a 17
| year old is disenfranchised for 4 years - they can engage
| with the political process as an adult as soon as they
| turn 18. Presidential elections aren't the only feature
| of democracy. They aren't even the only vote.
| itishappy wrote:
| Right, and drawing arbitrary lines is guaranteed to step
| on toes. In some ways, the fairest way is to draw it at
| the extreme (I'm not suggesting this is best, just that
| it sidesteps this particular issue). Children are humans,
| they're affected by political pressures same as the rest
| (and they'll experience these pressure for longer than
| most of us). We're also already choosing _not_ to
| restrict voting based on assumed capacity for reasoning.
| Individuals with down syndrome, dementia, and Alzheimer
| 's have their voting rights explicitly protected, but 16
| year-olds aren't ready.
|
| I guess my point boils down to simply: Why? There's
| arguments both ways, what's the reasoning?
| kcplate wrote:
| Whose voice does the 4 year old have? Theirs or their
| parents? What you do by opening the vote to children
| below a certain age is all you are doing is amplifying
| the vote of the parents, you are not giving voice to the
| children.
|
| At what age does the child who can vote actually have the
| capacity to choose their candidate and are even able to
| negotiate the mechanics of voting? Let's say 18 is too
| old, but how young before they are able to counter the
| influence of a parent and decide for themselves...I'd
| argue its at least well into their teens.
| dnissley wrote:
| You'll be aghast as to what the average 44 year old
| believes then
| dotnet00 wrote:
| You aren't going to gain life experience before the age
| if you keep raising the age of being allowed to live life
| to match that age.
|
| I know you're specifically referring to voting age, but
| just making a general observation on how everyone seems
| to only want to keep increasing these various arbitrary
| age gates as if simply being older is all it takes. Have
| you guys all forgotten when you went through these
| points?
|
| I still distinctly remember how glaringly stupid I
| realized the world was when I had to take a waiver notice
| to my university dorm room and sign as my dad a few days
| before turning 18, and that just a few days later I'd be
| fine to sign it as myself, despite obviously not changing
| much in a few days. Either way I had been living at a
| university thousands of miles from my parents for nearly
| 2 years and had said as much, so it was a farce all
| around.
|
| Similarly with turning 21 and being allowed to drink.
| keybored wrote:
| Obviously the US needs more mature voters. To match the
| very mature leaders ("") who are _so mature_ that they
| have symptoms of senility or die on the job while their
| helpers vote for them.
| adrr wrote:
| Should we put age limit on voting? 70 doesn't have the
| brain functionality of an 18 year old. Why they are very
| susceptible to fraud because of cognitive decline.
| smileysteve wrote:
| I think we should limit voting to those who block ads!
| patrickmay wrote:
| I support that idea because I think you should be in the
| work force and experience both taxation and laws
| personally before voting on them.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Personally, I think we should set the voting age to 35
| and cut off everyone above 37. It's too risky to let the
| old or young vote. We can raise both thresholds by one
| per year to account for inflation.
| rchaud wrote:
| In that case most of Congress should recuse themselves
| from voting on abortion bills considering they've been
| shooting blanks and having hot flashes since the 90s.
|
| That you were not fully informed when you voted at 18 is
| not a reason to restrict the rights of others who are. Or
| aren't. Who's to say a 25yo is somehow any better
| prepared to vote? It's not like they were asked to pass a
| civics test first.
| kccoder wrote:
| Plenty of "idiots" outside the age range of 18-25, should
| we restrict them as well? How would we determine who is
| qualified to vote? Any other rights provided by the
| constitution you'd like to alter while we're at it? What
| other responsibilities available 18-25 year olds would
| you like to restrict? The draft, driving a vehicle,
| taking out loans, ...? Perhaps they shouldn't be allowed
| to choose their own clothing, what food they eat, ...
| joezydeco wrote:
| What's the drinking age in Florida?
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| > What's the drinking age in Florida?
|
| The drinking age in all 50 states is 21 thanks in most
| part to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Mini
| mum_Drinking_Age_...
|
| In Florida it was raised to 21 in 1986: https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/U.S._history_of_alcohol_minimu...
|
| In Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands it's still 18
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| > Because at 18 people are responsible for their own
| actions
|
| This is only because we arbitrarily picked an age - we used
| to consider people responsible for their own actions at
| much younger ages, it makes sense to change the number when
| we get new science supporting that. If the argument is that
| we shouldn't use brain development as a reason to restrict
| young people, then why not lower the drinking age again or
| get rid of it?
| joezydeco wrote:
| This right here. Seems like the USA is all about
| arbitrary rules, isn't it?
|
| You can join the military and drive a tank into war at
| 18, but god forbid we let you have a beer afterward.
| awkward wrote:
| Science has discovered that the age of 25 is when
| neuroplasticity starts to decline. So what? There's a lot
| of argumentation needed to link that physical threshold
| with legal restriction.
|
| It seems like you're arguing that people shouldn't fully
| participate in society until they start losing their
| ability to learn. Have you met people who've lived overly
| sheltered lives until the age of 25? Their tolerance
| towards risk is low. Their ability to adapt to new
| experiences is busted. Forcing that on a society wide
| scale would be nuts.
|
| The science does throw in a lot of complexity between the
| social ideas of freedom and the physical effects of
| alcohol. But have you met 18 year olds? They're drinking.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| There's also the issue of life expectancy. In the US, for
| males? 77 years. Now we're basically saying "For the
| first third of your life, we're going to dictate a lot of
| what you can't do".
| bufio wrote:
| Policy should not be informed by TikTok memes about brain
| development.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Why let someone who isn't responsible for their own actions
| drive a car then, or have a checking account.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Why let someone who isn't responsible for their own
| actions drive a car then, or have a checking account._
|
| In many jurisdictions you cannot do those things without
| adult supervision.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You can drive without an adult at 16 everywhere in the
| US. No minimum age to own a long gun either I believe.
| awkward wrote:
| That's because of Ralph Nader and the FDIC, obviously.
| rchaud wrote:
| You are legally required to have auto insurance for
| exactly this reason. As for banking, there are limits on
| overdraft fees, also written into law because people are
| not always responsible with money regardless of age.
| ijijijjij wrote:
| They try people as adults before they turn 18
| pjc50 wrote:
| Excellent, have a whole group of voters who aren't allowed
| access to certain political information. Or are you going to
| raise the voting age to 25 as well?
|
| Perhaps we should also cut off people over 65, since they've
| proven to be more vulnerable to scams and financial
| exploitation over social media?
|
| (there's real arguments to be had about the negative effects
| of social media, but a serious discussion would include those
| on adults and old people as well, and this ban, like the
| TikTok one, is definitely more a part of culture war than a
| well-intentioned effort to improve the effect of telecoms on
| people's lives)
| speff wrote:
| It's not a TikTok ban.
| FredPret wrote:
| Heck, why not ban it altogether?
|
| In all seriousness, this is a great move that should be
| emulated. I'm a tech-optimist but the effect social media has
| on teenagers specifically and public discourse in general is
| absolutely toxic.
| gmadsen wrote:
| because the legal adult age in the US is 18?
| darby_eight wrote:
| Why not ban the businesses entirely? Certainly all the
| interesting points about banning TikTok apply even more to
| domestic companies than they do to foreign ones.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I'm a parent of an 11 and 14 year old and I have mixed feelings
| about this. First, I am concerned about the negative effect of
| social media on kids and my initial reaction to this was
| positive, but then I remembered my 11 year old daughter uses
| Messenger kids to keep up with her cousin across the country.
| They only see each other once a year so the fact that they have
| this connection I see as really positive, and the accounts on
| that platform are totally controlled by parents.
|
| My son is old enough the law would give us a choice and I'd let
| him keep Discord I think as well. If there is something
| positive here though it would be forcing the companies to make
| it easier for parents to control what their kids do, it should
| just be up to them.
| mmkos wrote:
| Great. I think few people have any doubts about social media
| being a net negative for young people.
| demondemidi wrote:
| Young people? I'd say people in general.
| II2II wrote:
| Perhaps that is part of the problem with these laws: we are
| playing a game of whack-a-mole instead of tackling the issue
| of mental health. While I personally avoid social media due
| to privacy concerns, I have encountered other adults my age
| who have expressed that they avoid social media for reasons
| related to mental health. While walking through my
| neighbourhood, it is clear that there are many people with
| mental health issues that society has all but abandoned. Then
| there are the people who have issues that they do not talk
| about and cannot be seen.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| You are literally posting to social media right now.
| II2II wrote:
| Perhaps it is because I put a heavier emphasis on the
| word _media_ , but I don't really classify HN as a social
| media site. It's more of a forum where people discuss
| submitted articles. The dynamics are entirely different.
|
| For one thing, there is a lot less "attention seeking"
| behaviour. While YCombinator and associated companies use
| it as a promotional tool, it is muted. Some end users may
| use it to drive traffic to their blogs or show off their
| skills, but it usually comes off as humble and related to
| common interests (or maybe the blatant self-promoters
| rarely make it to the front page). Even though some of
| the people who frequent (or pop in) here are more
| recognizable, I doubt that anyone is trying to win a
| popularity contest.
|
| I think stuff like that is important when considering the
| psychological impact of a site. For good or for ill,
| reality is reality. In contrast, social media sites tend
| to be driven by fantasy: fame and fortune for creators,
| endless exponential growth for investors, and all of that
| nonsense. That distortion of reality can be damaging for
| those who either seek to achieve it and for those who
| feel they will never measure up.
| hypeatei wrote:
| I don't find the broad stroke of "mental health" very
| useful in any discussions since it implies there is a
| baseline mentally healthy state. I think some people are
| able to handle social media and others aren't, and that's
| completely fine.
| II2II wrote:
| While I agree that mental health is an awfully broad
| stroke, I have seen few discussions that represent it as
| a baseline for a mentally healthy state. It is typically
| used when either self-harm or harm to others is involved.
| jl6 wrote:
| > tackling the issue of mental health
|
| What if reducing social media usage was a good way of
| tackling mental health issues?
| hackable_sand wrote:
| That is for the individual to decide, just like any other
| malady.
| rchaud wrote:
| The mental health issue was pre-empted by the
| advertisement-based business model that threw everything
| into an algorithmic blender to begin with, causing users to
| scroll more and more.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| I suspect literally billions of people have some doubts about
| that.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Do they happen to fall in a certain age group?
| csnover wrote:
| > I think few people have any doubts about social media being a
| net negative for young people.
|
| They _should_ have doubts. This position is not supported by
| the currently available evidence[0][1][2]. The APA's position
| paper makes this explicit: "Using social media is not
| inherently beneficial or harmful to young people."
|
| So long as focus remains on scapegoating 'social media' as the
| main cause of suffering, we will never solve the problem. The
| negative aspects of social media apply to young and old
| equally, and as far as I can tell are largely manifestations of
| deeper societal issues that have festered for generations.
|
| [0] https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-
| advi...
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8221420/
|
| [2] https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-
| time...
| oceliker wrote:
| > The APA's position paper makes this explicit: "Using social
| media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young
| people."
|
| I think this is just saying that social media is still part
| of society, and so there is nothing _inherently_ bad in using
| social media, which is just an extension of our offline
| lives. That doesn 't mean it's not harmful - if the offline
| life is harmful, social media can amplify it.
|
| > The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old
| equally
|
| The APA paper is filled with warnings specifically about
| adolescent social media use:
|
| > ...potential risks are likely to be greater in early
| adolescence -- a period of greater biological, social, and
| psychological transitions...
|
| > Parental monitoring... and developmentally appropriate
| limit-setting... is critical, especially in early
| adolescence.
|
| > Evidence suggests that exposure to maladaptive behavior may
| promote similar behavior among vulnerable youth, and online
| social reinforcement of these behaviors may be related to
| increased risk for serious psychological symptoms, even after
| controlling for offline influences.
|
| > Research demonstrates that adolescents' exposure to online
| discrimination and hate predicts increases in anxiety and
| depressive symptoms, even after controlling for how much
| adolescents are exposed to similar experiences offline.
|
| > Data indicate that technology use particularly within one
| hour of bedtime, and social media use in particular, is
| associated with sleep disruptions. Insufficient sleep is
| associated with disruptions to neurological development in
| adolescent brains, teens' emotional functioning, and risk for
| suicide.
|
| > Research suggests that using social media for social
| comparisons related to physical appearance... [is] related to
| poorer body image, disordered eating, and depressive
| symptoms, particularly among girls.
| djaouen wrote:
| Solution for teens wanting to be in social media: move to a
| better state lol
| HonestOp001 wrote:
| If you are saying a better state would allow them on social
| media, something that has been shown to be detrimental to
| children under eighteen, how can it be a better state?
| Hugsun wrote:
| Moving to another state is not accessible to most teenagers.
|
| You are probably joking and know that.
| aurareturn wrote:
| >Critics have said the bill violates the U.S. Constitution's
| First Amendment protections for free speech and that parents, not
| the government, should make decisions about the online presence
| of their children of all ages.
|
| It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children,
| especially early teens from using social media. This law should
| make it easier and it would put the work on Meta, Snap, Tiktok,
| Pinterest, Twitter to help parents.
|
| I'm personally glad that I grew up without social media but I
| worry about the kids growing up now. The amount of random junk
| young kids are exposed to on social media is worrying.
| edgyquant wrote:
| These critics have no understanding of the law. We've been
| making exceptions for children for decades at least, probably
| since the beginning of the republic
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| I assure you I have an understanding of the law. This is such
| a a rude and preposterous assertion in bad faith.
|
| This is a law mandating ID verification for all children and
| adults.
|
| If you require controls for everyone below a certain age, you
| de facto require controls for everyone of every age who does
| not prove they are over the minimum age. In other words, even
| if you can legally discriminate against children, my rights
| to speak anonymously as an adult are being taken away because
| if I don't show my ID, I will be treated as a child who has
| fewer rights.
|
| We can disagree on the merits, but please don't imply that
| everyone who disagrees with you is ipso facto an idiot.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Indeed. We've been round this when Facebook etc (most
| recently Glassdoor) instituted "real name" policies.
|
| I'm rather confused about HN's response to this because
| normally when a media platform _voluntarily_ tries to
| censor certain kinds of bad behavior there 's a massive
| backlash here, and now there's seemingly overwhelming
| support for simply removing a whole category of people from
| being able to speak at all, along with whatever real ID
| policy gets put in place to make it work.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| It's still early in the day. I expect this thread to get
| more diverse attention over time.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| > a whole category of people from being able to speak at
| all
|
| Hot take but I can go without the opinions of children.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Well, yeah. I can go without the opinions of any
| underrepresented group. (A lot of theoretical computer
| science work in my field was done by pseudonymous
| children, but it's not like I need that to live.) Doesn't
| mean _they_ can go without me hearing what they have to
| say.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| What theoretical computer science work is being done by
| middle schoolers? Are you a Minecraft YouTuber?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| But you have that for many things in the states.
|
| If you subscribe to cable, you need to prove your financial
| record, which excludes most people under 18. if you want to
| buy the special channels, you have to go through an extra
| set of hoops.
|
| Buying actual real media porn in stores or mail order,
| require(d) some level of age verification. If it went to a
| minor, massive fine and or a criminal record.
|
| You need to prove your age to drink(or buy) alcohol and
| drive a car, and vote. Minors are treated differently in
| most common law countries.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| > It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children,
| especially early teens from using social media.
|
| What are you talking about? Parents can use on-device controls,
| you can lock a phone down in many ways. There will be whiz kids
| who can get around these, but those few whiz kids can also
| easily get around any controls via legislation with VPNs.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| It doesn't require a whiz kid to get around the absolutely
| terrible implementation of parental controls on iOS. Based on
| the number of bugs in ScreenTime (TikTok restricted to 15
| minutes, but on the same screen shows 2.5 hours of use that
| day) I'm half convinced the feature is just parental control
| theater.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| Not speaking from personal experience. My kid is only 4.
|
| Your argument seems like exactly what my parents would have
| said about me spending so much time on TV, computers and
| electronics instead of studying, playing outside, sports etc.
|
| Almost exactly like your last paragraph.. "I'm personally glad
| that I grew up without infinite channels on TV, computers and
| its games, cell phones and your SMSes. I'm worried about your
| generation. You guys are exposed to a lot of junk and things
| that waste your attention." - Dad.
|
| Yet, here we are....
|
| May be kids of now will just need to be educated about the real
| impact and not be treated as if they are in glass houses?
| aurareturn wrote:
| I think there are magnitudes and cliffs for this stuff.
|
| TV --> has quality control, professionally done, goes through
| a team of editors/creators before making it onto the screen
|
| Early internet --> Mostly harmless content, can find dark
| stuff if kids look for it but it's pretty hard to find. More
| dangerous than TV but not too bad.
|
| SMS --> just chatting with people you know. Not afraid.
|
| TikTok, IG Reels, Youtube Shorts, Snapchat, Twitter: Good
| luck to you. Your kid is going to see a ton of deep fakes,
| edited images of unrealistic body proportions that the
| influencer won't disclose, heaps of radical and extremist
| views, undisclosed sponsorships masquerading as advice,
| targeted ads that anyone can buy, etc.
|
| The magnitude is much higher now - hence I think laws need to
| come in to make it easier for parents to get back some
| control.
|
| Go ahead and try to teach your kid who is going to spend
| hours each day seeing hundreds of videos each day - probably
| tens of thousands in a year. What are you going to do? Watch
| 100 Instagram Reels per day with your kid and explain each
| and every single one? As an adult, even I'm easily influenced
| by this stuff.
| freedomben wrote:
| You make a fair point. I think you have won me over
| philosophically. However, there is still the pragmatic and
| realistic approach to consider. Personally, I think moving
| to a world where internet content is gated behind ID checks
| is a terrible and horrible precedent to set that is going
| to have ramifications far beyond simply protecting teens
| who are under 16.
|
| As a parent of teenagers who are falling into this trap
| right now, it is something I am gravely concerned about. I
| am no tech, lightweight, and blocking and even regulating.
| This stuff is pretty much impossible. Short of helicopter
| parenting your child at all times. Nor do I think that sort
| of heavy-handed regulation is necessarily healthy, although
| that depends very much on the age in my opinion.
|
| But what does a world look like where every website and app
| has to, for liability reasons alone, assume that everyone
| is underage before proving that they are not?
| vel0city wrote:
| Also TVs since 2000 in the US were all _required_ to
| support v-chip which allowed parents to set restrictions on
| content. Getting around v-chip could often be somewhat
| complicated. Meanwhile it is usually pretty trivial to get
| around parental control software on computers.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| My parents couldn't switch inputs on the TV, there's zero
| chance they could configure a v-chip without my help.
| Most of my friends' parents were the same way. I don't
| think this technology had the impact you think it had.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > Early internet --> Mostly harmless content, can find dark
| stuff if kids look for it but it's pretty hard to find.
| More dangerous than TV but not too bad.
|
| In the early 90's the dark stuff was mixed in with the
| porn. If you were looking for porn on the internet before
| it was available on web browsers, aka on usenet or
| anonymous FTP, you got exposed to the dark stuff.
|
| And I'm fairly confident that a large percentage of teens
| using the Internet in the pre-WWW age were looking for
| porn.
| odessacubbage wrote:
| as a parent you _have_ all the control. why does your kid
| need a tablet? why do they need a smart phone like at all?
| these devices did not just magically materialize in your
| home, the tooth fairy didn 't put them there. you chose to
| plop your toddler in front of a screen because electronic
| vicodin was easier than parenting and then you chose not to
| lock down their devices with the abundant parental controls
| you are given and then you decided you couldn't be assed to
| teach them basic internet safety habits or how to develop
| healthy skepticism and that seeing isn't always believing.
| really the only thing your children have been '''exposed
| to''' is your own laziness and utter unwillingness to offer
| them direction. the world will continue to exist whether we
| like it or not, and some day our kids will have to live in
| it just like we do. we can either prepare them for what's
| really there, warts and all or we can hide them away only
| toss them to the wolves when they turn 18 with the delusion
| that this somehow preserved their innocence. i personally
| believe giving them the grace of a childhood to learn how
| to deal with the bumpy parts of life is a much kinder
| option.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I understand what you are getting at, but to inject some
| nuance:
|
| TV, print, radio, music and to a lesser extent games are all
| subject to some level of industry or statutory content
| regulation.
|
| For example, in America, you're _very_ unlikely to have a
| kids TV channel suddenly switch to videos of people being
| killed in industrial accidents. new media, not so much.
|
| Watershed, age constraints and company ending fines existed
| (and in some cases still do) for violating those rules.
|
| Large new media companies, such as facebook, youtube and
| tiktok can literally serve porn to kids and not have any
| legal ramifications. If a cable broadcaster knowingly
| broadcast frontal nudity before watershed, it would be fined.
| (yes, cable TV has less restrictions) but thats the point,
| regulation has not kept up with the pace of change. that has
| been a deliberate decision.
|
| My kids are >5 < 12. They aren't allowed on insta/tiktok.
| They can have youtube, but its only when supervised. even
| then its 1/3 chance that they land on something toxic as
| shit.
|
| The world has changed, and the guard rails that we had as
| kids have been removed. There is an argument about freedom of
| expression, I get that. But we need to think about whether
| its right to allow large corporations to profit from showing
| horrific content to minors. (adults, I don't give a shit, do
| what you want) The problem is, I'm not sure of the best
| mechanism, with the least bad outcome.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 25 years ago us kids were watching viral content on the
| internet that wasn't even acceptable to go on youtube then
| or now. Still today, we are now your young doctors and
| lawyers and young business executives, despite all the
| quite disturbing viral content that characterized the early
| 2000s internet. I think we did fine and I think the kids
| will be alright too.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Who is us kids? I assume you're talking about 4Chan? I
| wasn't watching what I'd describe as disturbing viral
| content 25 years ago.
| vel0city wrote:
| 25 years ago most people didn't even have a broadband
| connection in their home much less any kind of mobile
| data plan.
|
| 25 years ago kids didn't walk around with challenging to
| audit handheld computers. The computer, if your family
| had one, was that one big thing shared with the whole
| family that an adult could pop their head in and see what
| the child was up to.
|
| That _some_ kids (an _incredibly_ tiny fraction) did have
| unrestricted access to the internet and turned out fine
| isn 't indicative of the general population of kids
| having this kind of exposure and being fine. If in 1999
| you had internet fast enough to really download many many
| hours of videos without being audited by a parent you
| were probably the 1% of 1% of 1% of child populations. A
| high percentage of households _didn 't even have internet
| at all_. In 2000 only 1% of US households even _had_
| broadband internet.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-
| bro...
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I did too, but I would gently point out that you had to
| actively look for it. something rotten was a known site
| for that kinda stuff. You only went there if you were
| doing "illicit browsing" shall we say.
|
| It was pretty difficult to stumble over a video of
| something visceral. Moreover, the internet wasn't real
| when we grew up.
|
| The internet is real and omnipresent, filled with the
| mountains of clickbated bullshit, and only ever three
| videos away from some sort of porn(if you're lucky).
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| We had chatroullette too for our more sporadic visceral
| disturbances, also live leak existed then.
| vel0city wrote:
| You did not have Chatroulette (2009) and Liveleak (2006)
| 25 years ago.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| SomethingAwful.com and rotten.com were two separate
| sites, as a historical note.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| sorry yes, thank you for the correction.
| alfor wrote:
| Just look at birth rate, depression, etc.
|
| You will see we are in a dead end.
|
| I don't think this law will change the trend unless there
| is major concerted effort.
|
| Boys have access to so much porn and gaming that they are
| checking out of real life. Girls have their problems too
| with social media.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Porn and gaming? Really? Boys had this in spades for 35
| years. Longer if you count the pinball wizard/hustler
| magazine under the bed era.
| vel0city wrote:
| There's a _world_ of difference between a 90 's Hustler
| magazine and near infinite modern internet porn. They're
| practically incomparable.
| mmkos wrote:
| You really can't speak for everyone. You can maybe say
| this particular cohort is fine _despite_ seeing some of
| this content while young, but certainly not _because_ of
| it.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| And 40 years ago kids were watching bootleg copies of
| Faces of Death. Yes, kids get to that stuff. The problem
| is FoD doesn't even hold a candle to the manipulative
| shit that social media does to kids.
| kcplate wrote:
| It was not all that easy to get a copy of Faces of Death
| back then, so it was something you might have saw once
| maybe twice but that violent real death before your eyes
| was not something that you ever became de-sensitized to
| because those visuals were exceedingly rare by the
| scarcity of the content at the time(at least in the US).
| So that morbid curiosity itch was scratched and then you
| moved on. Short of the few weird kids that watched that
| shit over and over, you probably never watched the whole
| thing. I know I think I watched 10 mins back in the day
| before it was turned off and we went out to find some
| beer instead. Now, real violence and death is a search
| term away and available every minute, hour, and day.
|
| But agree...even that exposure to violence now pales in
| comparison to the amplification of the negative peer
| pressures that kids today experience due to social media.
| At least back in the day when you were away from your
| peers you could escape it and gain respite. Now its
| constant.
| haswell wrote:
| There's some survivorship bias here. Not everyone who was
| exposed to disturbing content is unaffected or can move
| past it so easily. And in 2024, it's far more likely to
| encounter something you had no intention of seeing.
|
| It's worth thinking about the social climate right now as
| the long tail of the last 25-30 years of technology
| advancement. Mass shootings are so common now they often
| don't even register on people's radar.
|
| These effects are so complex that we're still trying to
| figure out how to measure them, but we should take
| seriously the power and danger of the instant wide
| distribution of the worst elements of humanity.
|
| I grew up on the old Internet, and made some of my most
| important friendships using it. It shaped who I am today,
| mostly for the better. But I don't think we can let
| nostalgia or even the many benefits blind us to what the
| Internet has become or the real harms that come along
| with those benefits.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > And in 2024, it's far more likely to encounter
| something you had no intention of seeing.
|
| Strongly disagree. I haven't stumbled on "goatse" level
| shock imagery in years. Sure you might encounter stuff
| you had no intention of seeing, but that's only because
| you're being funnelled into link farms or other for-
| profit crapware flooding the internet. It's very rare to
| stumble on something disturbing.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| In the last year I have seen (on facebook no less):
|
| various levels of war crime
|
| the killing of people at close quarters (with the last
| sound that they made, which still haunts me)
|
| A sniper killing someone taking a poo.
|
| These were nestled in amongst memes, which were fun and
| engaging. None of them had content warnings.
|
| goatse wasn't all that shocking to me, because he is very
| much alive. 2 girls one cup is at least a ramp into skat,
| rather than straight in.
|
| Now, if a 16 year old saw that, I'd probably not worry
| too much, I wouldn't be happy. But if my 10 year old, or
| 6 year old saw that, I'd have a whole load of emotional
| clean up to do.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Goatse is tame as fuck by modern internet standards.
| luplex wrote:
| I don't think the main problem with social media is the
| occasional inappropriate content.
|
| The main problem is that most of the "appropriate"
| content is soul-sucking, biased, addictive and empty of
| substance.
| geraldhh wrote:
| > most of the "appropriate" content is soul-sucking,
| biased, addictive and empty of substance
|
| sounds a lot like tv
| hgomersall wrote:
| We carefully vet what our 6yo watches on TV. You're right
| - not much passes muster.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Or really all other media. If you think print isn't also
| biased, addictive, and lacking substance you need to read
| less nyt and more chomsky
| bear141 wrote:
| While a lot of this can definitely sound like an old man
| yelling at the sky, tv compared to scrolling tiktok, is
| like caffeine compared to crack cocaine.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| You're criticizing the lack of moderation. _So let 's make
| a law about that_!
|
| Adults can be traumatized, too. Making this about children
| has us putting up barriers in the wrong places.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > May be [sic] kids of now will just need to be educated
| about the real impact
|
| Education about the real impact will not happen if there is
| profit to be made in forsaking education.
| msluyter wrote:
| I think the empirical evidence is fairly clear,
| actually.[1][2]
|
| Having struggled with various forms of screen addiction
| myself, I find it sort of odd that a lot of people are so
| laissez faire about giving children the most addictive device
| ever created.[3] Whether or not this law is a good idea, I
| think it's incumbent on parents to monitor and limit screen
| time and access to social media. Which is difficult! When my
| wife and I are tired, setting my daughter down in front of an
| ipad is the easiest way to get a break.
|
| [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23
| 522...
|
| [2] https://jeanmtwenge.substack.com/p/yes-its-the-phones-
| and-so...
|
| [3] Sure, it's not technically "the device," itself, but
| rather what it makes possible.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It's risky to describe the claims of social studies profs
| as clear empirical evidence, given the history of the
| field.
|
| Twenge makes some unscientific arguments in her blog post,
| like constantly conflating correlation with causation
| despite her evidence not being able to show that. She also
| seems to think that if she knocks down a series of counter-
| arguments, then that means that her own argument must be
| correct. Given that Haidt's identical claims already turned
| out to be based on very poor quality evidence [1], their
| argumentation must be examined carefully before rushing to
| action.
|
| Still, assume for a moment that it's a correct causal
| inference despite the major flaws in their evidence base.
| There's another tricky aspect to this. The Twenge/Haidt
| argument is really only about teenage girls. Although Haidt
| is basically honest about this (see [2]), Twenge is not.
| The opening of her article you cite talks about teenagers
| in general, but the first figure only shows data for girls
| and women. Then the second figure is even captioned "Figure
| 2: tech adoption, teen depression" but the legend actually
| says "Depression, girls". A few paragraphs later she's
| making claims about "individuals" whilst providing evidence
| that's once again specific to teenage girls. Her article is
| full of sloppy conflations like this.
|
| Anyway, needless to say, neither politicians nor academics
| are willing to only ban social media for girls. This would
| upset the left so the argument morphs seamlessly into
| "social media should be banned for all teenagers" which
| isn't a story found in their data. This punishes boys for
| the mental health problems of girls, but is that just?
|
| There's also a more subtle logical problem with this
| argument. It assumes that teenagers are a fixed group, and
| thus any change in their behavior must be due to some
| immediate alteration to their environment. But it's not:
| "teenage" is a sliding window that people constantly pass
| through. In other words it's possible that these depressed
| teens have _always_ been somehow messed up, and simply aged
| into the categorization they 're looking at. By implication
| the true answer could be found in earlier periods, even as
| far as back as changes to childrearing practices in the
| late 80s/early 90s rather than something that changed
| specifically in 2012. One theory posits that it's something
| to do with the rise of extremely early daycare for infants
| (e.g. for children less than one or two years old), and
| they also have a variety of correlations to bolster their
| case.
|
| It may be that social studies academics simply cannot
| answer such questions.
|
| [1] https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-
| evide... _" Haidt's compendium of research does point to
| one important finding: Because these studies have failed to
| produce a single strong effect, social media likely isn't a
| major cause of teen depression. A strong result might
| explain at least 10 percent or 20 percent of the variation
| in depression rates by difference in social media use, but
| the cited studies typically claim to explain 1 percent or 2
| percent or less. These levels of correlations can always be
| found even among totally unrelated variables in
| observational social science studies. Moreover the studies
| do not find the same or similar correlations, their
| conclusions are all over the map."_
|
| [2] https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-
| illness-epi...
| msluyter wrote:
| It definitely appears much worse for girls, but afaict,
| depression has risen in boys as well, just by not as
| much. See graphs here: [1]
|
| So if social medial is harmful in general, I don't view
| prohibiting it a "punishment" for boys; perhaps like less
| of a benefit? Regarding your second point, I imagine the
| data would provide some clues. If the kids that are now
| teens were always more depressed, I'd imagine that we'd
| see more pre-teen depression ~3-8 years ago. I haven't
| looked into it closely.
|
| And I grant that social science statistics are often
| problematic -- I imagine it'll take a while to really
| know what's going on.
|
| [1] https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-
| illness-pa...
| mike_hearn wrote:
| But the rise in depression is only amongst some people,
| not everyone uniformly. Yet nearly ~all teenagers use the
| internet and something that can be described as social
| media. So it'd be punishing the majority who can use
| something responsibly and even get enjoyment and benefit
| from it, for the lack of self control of a minority (who
| could easily just log off but won't).
|
| All that assumes the link actually holds, indeed. The two
| articles in Reason are persuasive that it doesn't hold
| though. The social media discussion in that case is just
| a distraction that stops people figuring out the real
| causes.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > May be kids of now will just need to be educated about the
| real impact and not be treated as if they are in glass
| houses?
|
| The problem with this argument is that TV had ads and while
| they are manipulative, they are absolutely no match for the
| shit that Meta, YouTube, etc pull. Kids (and quite obviously
| lots of adults) simply do not have the ability to deal with
| that.
| yawboakye wrote:
| tv, computer, radio, social media, and more broadly the
| internet, are mediums of communication and distribution. what
| tv content/substance did you grow up with? is that in and way
| comparable to the content/substance kids these days grow up
| with? the ban is on the medium but the import is on the
| content. too much junk on the internet these days. it doesn't
| help that (1) they're way cheaper to produce, and
| unfortunately (2) highly rewarded (by the platform owners)
| for their ability to keep users glued.
|
| until it's possible to have strong and reliable filters, the
| only way to protect tender minds is through controlled
| exposure.
| indigo0086 wrote:
| Agree and disagree. Kids can't really understand the negative
| impact of the things made to alter their mind, and since
| their parents are responsible for them, it's their job not to
| just explain, but to do their best to limit or participate in
| their usage. This is only difficult if your children are not
| in your presence 24/7 (public school, hanging out at malls,
| etc).
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > This is only difficult if your children are not in your
| presence 24/7 (public school, hanging out at malls, etc).
|
| So you're just saying it is difficult.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It's the paradox of being a parent that is commonly
| hoisted upon you.
|
| If you hang too close you're a helicopter parent. If you
| aren't around and they do something wrong idiots scream
| "where are the parents!?"
| lupusreal wrote:
| What if it was the responsibility of parents to make sure
| their kids didn't smoke cigarettes, but it was legal for
| stores to sell cigarettes to kids? Responsible parents could
| tell their children they are forbidden from buying them,
| explain all the reasons why it's bad, and then kids could
| just walk into a store and buy them anyway. Putting it all on
| parents doesn't work, parents aren't capable of supervising
| 24/7 and it isn't reasonable to act like they are or should
| be.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| So you grew up without AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo accounts,
| web forums and MySpace? Or for the generation before that,
| Geocities and Usenet?
|
| The current form of interactive online platforms may be flawed
| but banning teens from using them is not the solution and any
| effective method of enforcing such a law is likely to run afoul
| of the 1st Amendment. Besides obviously the Tinker v. Des
| Moines precedent about how teens have the right to engage in
| non-disruptive speech at school which is probably sufficient to
| overturn this if the Supreme Court recognizes the precedent.
|
| Under COPPA, the "parental consent" requirement for under-13s
| to sign up for online accounts turned into a de-facto ban
| because no parent or web site wants to deal with mailed
| permission forms. The informal "don't ask don't tell" policy
| works pretty well though because it functions as an IQ test to
| keep the kids who are too dumb to figure out that you're
| supposed to lie about your age (as I did to be able to use
| Geocities when I was 10) off of the internet. A "parental
| consent" requirement is effectively a ban which is what it was
| in the original law that DeSantis vetoed. But it sounds like
| this was a major priority for the Speaker of the state House so
| it was going to happen in some form possibly over the
| governor's veto in a worse form if he completely opposed it.
| aurareturn wrote:
| >So you grew up without AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo
| accounts, web forums and MySpace? Or for the generation
| before that, Geocities and Usenet?
|
| Both.
| MissTake wrote:
| I grew up in a time when social computing was when we geeks
| of ages 13-15 brought each others Computers to a house and
| challenged each other to write games on another device.
|
| Back in the days when I had an Acorn Atom and friends would
| bring their Spectrum, Oric--1, TRS-80, Commodore 64 etc.
| prpl wrote:
| You forgot IRC.
|
| Most the bad stuff I saw on the internet ~99/2000 was from
| IRC.
|
| I had the unfortunate idea to nick myself TheGiver after the
| novel at 14.
| tmaly wrote:
| I know there is this big push to limit screen time for kids.
|
| I give screen time more as a reward for hard work and getting
| chores done.
|
| I use the screen time feature on Apple devices to limit my kids
| screen time and the type of apps they can access.
| Clubber wrote:
| The funny thing is Facebook already has restrictions on serving
| ads to and collecting data from kids under 13. They have a
| popup that asks, "Are you over 13?" at which point my then 11
| year old daughter clicked yes.
|
| This is feel-good legislation and is not realistically
| enforceable. People can argue about it all they want, it won't
| change anything because it's not enforceable.
|
| >It requires them to use a third-party verification system to
| screen out those who are underage.
|
| We'll see how well that works.
| dahart wrote:
| As a parent, I'm concerned about social media, and it has been
| more or less impossible to stop my teens from using it. They
| were jailbreaking and using VPNs and bypassing my parental
| controls a lot earlier than I expected. I did notice that
| whenever my kids didn't have access to phones and games for
| several days for whatever reason, they were less grouchy and
| more willing to engage with us and do family or social
| activities.
|
| That said, one thing my teenagers clued me in to is that these
| efforts to require parental involvement by law have some
| underlying motivations that are not being said out loud. One of
| them is to out kids to their parents early and cut off online
| support for teens going through gender identity issues,
| especially gay and trans kids, perhaps under the assumption
| that gender identity is a choice and that online activities are
| somehow causal.
|
| Considering the suicide rates among teens with gender issues,
| and the growing number of physiological indicators, I'm not
| sure cutting off all online support for them is a good idea.
| One of my kids does have gender identity issues and has
| considered suicide, and as a parent that breaks my heart and
| scares me more than anything. It was surprising to find out
| about the gender issues, and it started coming out around 14,
| so it's easy to jump to conclusions that social media is a bad
| influence. But in retrospect, the signs had been there for a
| long time and we failed to see and acknowledge them. Our kid
| said that online support is what kept her from attempting
| suicide even earlier.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Yeah, what a weird spooky coincidence that someone like
| DeSantis would make a move that's cut off kids' means to
| countermand their parents' information lockout.
|
| Send them to a private school, or even better, homeschool,
| control what kind of people they make friends with, keep them
| busy with church and Sunday school and bible study, burn the
| books and defund the public libraries, control what music
| they listen to and what shows and films they watch and the
| games they play... and, of course, control their means of
| communication.
|
| Heaven forbid your child ever be exposed to anything that
| might make them question the reality of this little garden of
| Eden you've imprisoned them in.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| I'm an exmormon who grew up in Utah. I have seen a very
| significant amount of _positive_ engagement over social media
| with people who desperately need it.
|
| My state's version of this law is to force ID-verification
| for porn sites. For that stated purpose, it isn't even
| remotely effective. But what about convincing a child to
| admit to their parents (or Mormon Bishop) that they watch
| pornography? That's where it gets truly concerning.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| > Our kid said that online support is what kept her from
| attempting suicide even earlier.
|
| No consideration for the idea that being perpetually online
| is what caused this gender issues in the first place?
| kevingadd wrote:
| Yes, because gender issues didn't exist until the internet
| did. They _definitely_ didn 't exist decades or centuries
| ago:
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-
| his...
| rymiel wrote:
| Did you even read what they said? Your fantasy is debunked
| by the post itself. It's also debunked by reality, but oh
| well
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children,
| especially early teens from using social media.
|
| I'm trying to decide whether it's "extremely easy" or
| "extremely difficult" for parents to stop their children from
| having a cell phone. One the one hand, all you have to do is
| _not_ spend money and _not_ buy a phone, easy. And yet, almost
| every kid has a cell phone, so evidently it is hard for parents
| to say no.
|
| This law will put social media in the same situation. It will
| be "extremely easy" for parents to simply _not_ give
| permission, but, like cell phones, I think most kids will end
| up having social media accounts anyway.
| rokkitmensch wrote:
| I had a conversation with a mom recently where she wanted my
| input on her media choices because she thought what I was
| doing was cool and admirable.
|
| It all fell apart when she realized that she'd have to yank
| the XBox, the PS*, the Switch, etc.
|
| Her kid, and all of the other entitled ones with endless
| access to everything on the internet, are utterly intolerable
| when they come over -- until they go outside with my kids for
| a few hours and come back in with their heads reset!
| gnicholas wrote:
| Phones are not that expensive anymore. Kids can buy used
| phones for $100, or get hand-me-downs from friends. They can
| use them on wifi, or if they are able to get a prepaid SIM
| they can use them on cellular also.
| mfrc wrote:
| Why should companies be forced to help parents supervise their
| own children? It's ironic that DeSantis is all about parental
| freedom yet wants to turn the companies into a nanny.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| He's a leader in the party of big government -- but I doubt
| he would admit it.
|
| At least the other side doesn't hide the fact that they're in
| favor of regulations.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Should liquor stores be required to stop children from buying
| alcohol?
|
| Should 7-11 be required to stop children from buying
| pornography magazines?
| mise_en_place wrote:
| Yeah it is difficult being a parent. Welcome to parenting and
| adulthood. The solution isn't more big government and a massive
| police/surveillance state. It's no wonder Stumpy didn't get too
| far in the primaries, people could spot his deep state
| tendencies from a mile away.
| crysin wrote:
| This trope that kids are more vulnerable to the influence of
| social media is dangerous. Media literacy, social media
| literacy, and internet literacy are critical for all ages, as
| without it you could be 10 or 40 and be equally influenced by
| some "influencer" you watch daily videos from. There are plenty
| of adults who react just as equally as a child would. Age does
| not guarantee maturity or competency.
| gnicholas wrote:
| One thing I worry about, as a parent in Silicon Valley, is that
| my kid will somehow procure a phone and hide it from us. My
| kids don't have enough cash to go buy a new phone without us
| noticing, but used phones are pretty cheap. Also, a wealthy
| friend/boyfriend could buy a phone and pay for cellular (MVNOs
| are quite inexpensive these days), which would defeat router-
| based monitoring. My kids are currently too young to do any of
| this, but I foresee it as an issue in the future.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > parents, not the government, should make decisions
|
| Now do alcohol, cigarettes, adult bars
| bregma wrote:
| Does this require everyone present a government ID to access
| anything online? Are international content provider going to be
| compelled to report transgressions to Florida state authorities?
| internetter wrote:
| This is a good question. Does this only apply if I write "i'm
| 14" when I sign up for the app? Or will I need to prove I'm not
| underage?
| sf_rob wrote:
| I think structuring the law as a penalty is "smart" in that the
| government does not have to explicitly ask providers to require
| ID, but I can't imagine them not being at significant financial
| risk without doing so. This will make the providers look like
| the "bad guy" to an end-user.
| finfrastrcuture wrote:
| isn't this misguided? good regulation would go after why sites
| are designed to be addictive / target children - targeted ads.
| vaylian wrote:
| Does anyone know where to find the actual law text? Otherwise
| it's hard to assess, what this really means.
| mminer237 wrote:
| https://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Documents/loaddoc.as...
| bvasilchenko wrote:
| Ah! The good old party of small government, individual liberties
| and free market. Well done sticking to your principals sirs and
| madams!
| itsoktocry wrote:
| So the party of small government isn't allowed to make any
| laws, even for (what they consider, at least) the well-being of
| society?
|
| This concept that "the other side" can't do _anything_ right is
| going to be the end of society.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| It's the hypocrisy of espousing liberty while systematically
| stripping away personal rights.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Nice strawman, the political realignment called and says it
| wants a word with you
| palmfacehn wrote:
| In other news, 2024's 1.2T budget was recently approved.
|
| All roads lead to Rome. Both parties generally seek to expand
| the scope of the state. Although there are a few Republican
| senators who lean towards minarchist principles.
|
| Expect the cultural right to demand social media verification
| to protect the children. The illiberal left might demand ID
| verification to protect the public from the scourge of
| dangerous misinformation and hate speech.
|
| The rationalizations will vary for either side of the spectrum.
| The two goal posts have been positioned. Don't be surprised
| when the free-kick goes down the middle and Digital ID is
| presented as a panacea.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=digital+ID+site%253Aweforum....
| bequanna wrote:
| "Small government" doesn't mean what you imply, it means that
| government exists to fill the gaps and clean up some of the
| "messiness" created by free markets.
|
| Reasonable regulation and public safety is part of that.
| mycodendral wrote:
| Good. Fuck social media.
| internetter wrote:
| I agree with Meta that this should be implemented at an app store
| level
| bart_spoon wrote:
| That seems ridiculous considering virtually all social media is
| available both as an application, and as a website. App Store
| controls won't do anything in regards to usage through the web.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| For the web it should be an HTTP header, integrated into the
| existing parental control systems on the device.
| nekochanwork wrote:
| "I don't want my kids using social media without my permission"
| is a problem that already has a solution: put parental controls
| on your kids devices.
|
| We don't need Daddy Government to make decisions that can and
| should be made by parents.
| fdsfdsafdsafds wrote:
| Restricting access to devices is the easy part (although
| keeping ahead of kids breaking in is not). Exposing your kids
| to enormous peer pressure and social isolation is the hard
| part.
| lolinder wrote:
| There's a collective action problem here, though. Some parents
| are willing to do the hard thing and tell their kid no over and
| over and over. Most aren't. The result is that kids don't hang
| out in person any more and so the _only_ social outlet left is
| digital, which makes the decision to ban it at the family level
| even harder because you may actually do more harm than good by
| forcing your child to not participate with his friends.
|
| If there's widespread agreement that social media is dangerous
| and yet widespread difficulty coordinating a response among
| parents, isn't that exactly what the government is for?
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Kids will quickly learn that if their parents say "yes", they
| can get on social media, and so parents will still have to
| say "no" over and over again. The only difference is now we
| need to make sure our government papers are in order before
| we participate in the most important communication forum of
| our time.
| iteria wrote:
| We can apply this to everything. No one is trying to raise
| the age of candy and soda purchase to 16. Although we know
| that having access to these things drastically impacts
| children's health. Fast food too.
|
| Like it's the literal job of a parent to tell their kids no.
| Over and over and over again. So instead of parents teaching
| healthy habits easy with something a child will not be a le
| to avoid as an adult, we'll just unleash them on them right
| when failure is high impact because some parents are lazy and
| we're not willing to have public service campaigns anymore.
|
| Or really want this is is one more step to a de-anon'd
| internet, where everyone's speech can be controlled.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Every parenting problem has the same collective action
| problem. It's called peer pressure.
|
| The only effective response I'm aware of is a collective one.
| This is not that. This is fascism.
| cgearhart wrote:
| > put parental controls on your kids devices
|
| We did that. My kids (twins) pooled their allowance money for a
| few months and had a friend at school buy them an old iPhone
| that they shared in a locker at school. They went _wild_ on
| social media once they were set loose, to the detriment of
| everyone involved.
|
| There was a government report in the last couple years that
| concluded (paraphrasing) "the ideal amount of social media for
| teens is greater than zero and less than 'all day'--but it's
| not clear where it becomes harmful."
|
| TL;DR-nature, uh, finds a way...
| silent_cal wrote:
| Might as well put porn on TV and billboards and tell parents to
| cover their kids eyes and change the channel. It's about time
| government did something useful for once.
| bad_username wrote:
| My daughter broke or worked around three different parental
| control systems, including Google's own Family Link. There is
| always some webview in some settings page that will not be
| regulated and can be used to browse the Internet or some crap
| like this. These systems are either all poor or this game of
| whack a mole is unwinnable in principle.
| djaouen wrote:
| Talk about big government encroaching on personal liberties!
| gallamine wrote:
| It's a state government restricting minors ...
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| In light of empirical evidence, it is positive legislation.
| However, let us not be fooled that the problem is the algorithms.
| In my anecdote I see a clear divide between the classic phase of
| interaction in chronological order and algorithmic intervention.
|
| The action of algorithms orchestrating human interactions reminds
| me of Asimov's Mule[0] and at this point in events it is certain
| that the algorithm builders have very fine control over human
| mental patterns. If I were to choose just one target for my
| efforts to sanitize the internet I would focus my fire on
| algorithms. Legislate without mercy.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_and_Empire
| tech_ken wrote:
| > at this point in events it is certain that the algorithm
| builders have very fine control over human mental patterns
|
| IMO this _dramatically_ oversells the power of recommender
| systems, and in a way which further serves their owners '
| interests rather than challenging them. In fact, I think what's
| clear is that they are at best able to achieve a very _gross_
| level of control over human mental patterns, one which is not
| meaningfully different than previous forms of media that have
| popped up throughout history. "Engagement", keeping someone
| scrolling long enough that they accumulate a nontrivial
| probability of clicking on an ad, is the lowest common
| denominator of marketing. Television, radio, and print media
| have long understood how to keep people serially "engaged"
| (consider the 'if it bleeds it leads' mentality of local news,
| or the emergence of 'angertainment' on CNN or FOX in the 90s
| and onwards).
|
| But stimulating engagement is very different from actually
| controlling someone or altering their behavior in a way beyond
| "hey look at this interesting thing!". Consider that the click-
| through rate for Meta ads is on the order of ~1%, and this is
| literally their most valuable metric. They achieve this not by
| actually persuading people that an ad they don't care about is
| actually interesting (which to me would be the real acid test
| of whether they have 'fine control'), but rather by (a)
| effectively segmenting the audience in a way TV can't and (b)
| keeping the audience engaged long enough that maybe they click
| an ad. While they're no doubt good at both of these things, I
| think it's telling that the best these platforms have been able
| to do is the same strategy that every other form of mass media
| has also stumbled on: throw enough sensational crap your way
| that you stick around long enough to maybe click an ad.
|
| To your point more directly: I agree that being able to agitate
| large groups of people in the same way is a dangerous ability,
| but I think it's also one that's very old and very common. It
| is not the unique provenance of 'algorithms', it's just the
| nature of mass media acting as a demagogue (look at role of
| newspapers in the lead-up to the Spanish-American war, for an
| example that predates our modern era). The way we challenge
| this is IMO _not_ by treating the problem as something entirely
| new and overwhelmingly powerful ( "big tech algorithms are mind
| control rays"), it's by looking at the historical record and
| recycling the strategies which have worked before (libel and
| slander laws, journalistic ethics, and trust-busting).
| Certainly there are elements of the problem which are new and
| unique , but from where I'm sitting the differences seem
| smaller than the similarities.
| devsda wrote:
| > Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, opposed the
| legislation, saying it would limit parental discretion and raise
| data privacy concerns because of the personal information users
| would have to provide to be age-verified.
|
| They can delegate or they can archive and choose not to use this
| data for anything other than the stated purpose.
|
| Are they indirectly saying that they can't restrain themselves
| and that any data they collect for whatever reasons is fair game
| ?
|
| I guess their problem is if someone submits identifying data
| willingly they will not be able to use it for other purposes
| without consent and they will look suspicious even when they
| infer the data/connections independently.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39822577
| apantel wrote:
| There's an alternative to a blanket restriction on all types of
| social media:
|
| When I was growing up, there was basically just ICQ
| (predominantly chat, sparse text profile), then MSN
| (predominantly chat, sparse text profile with one or a few
| profile photos), then early MySpace where nobody was uploading
| their real identity. I think it would have been a shame to not
| have access to those types of networks. I met so many people
| through those types of networks.
|
| The law could put a restriction only on the post-2005 type of
| social media which is about publishing a curated stream of life
| updates with one's real identity in rich media (photos, videos).
| If you take that all of that out, there's nothing to 'like' or
| compare yourself to.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| According to the article, the bill requires social media
| platforms ban accounts belonging to underage users and delete
| "personal information collected from terminated accounts".
|
| I'm no lawyer and haven't read the actual text, but if you have
| a platform where there are no accounts and everyone posts
| anonymously or under a pseudonym, like 4chan, it completely
| sidesteps this.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| The biggest problem I see is that we're now essentially requiring
| ID to use substantial parts of the internet. So many business
| only have a Facebook page, Google maps has social features.
|
| I already didn't want a Facebook account just to see a businesses
| specials, now I'll need to present ID too?
|
| Certainly interested to see how all this plays out.
| macintux wrote:
| I've gotten by for the last several years without Facebook or
| Google (I do use a YT account, but not for anything
| meaningful). It's annoying, but doable.
| Clubber wrote:
| >I've gotten by for the last several years without Facebook
| or Google (I do use a YT account, but not for anything
| meaningful). It's annoying, but doable.
|
| I think the point is that the internet and particularly
| social media is now the de-facto town square. States are
| basically requiring identification to speak or criticize
| government in the town square. If you take a step back and
| look at it that way, it's grossly anti-American.
|
| Imagine back in the day, if you had any type of
| meeting/gathering to discuss anything that might be related
| to politics, and the police were there to collect everyone's
| Id. AA meetings, computer meetups, hobby gathering, HOA
| meetings, etc. This is essentially that, except on a
| computer. Just think of the children!
| Gud wrote:
| It's not a defacto town square though.
|
| If anything, these services are more similar to shopping
| malls. And don't be surprised when the mall cop throws you
| out for causing a scene, or just lounging about and not
| consuming enough.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| 1. You don't need an ID to shop at a mall.
|
| 2. The government doesn't tell mall cops what to do.
| everforward wrote:
| I can't reply to the other responder, but even if these are
| shopping malls... Those are already acknowledged as common
| spaces at least in California where most of them are
| headquartered. Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, it was
| held that a shopping mall was not allowed to remove
| students asking for signatures on a motion.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| PruneYards was found not to be significantly harmed by
| the expressive activity, because the goal of the
| commercial activity is to sell stuff. But the goal of an
| online social media platform is to curate a coherent
| speech product, and allowing people to insert themselves
| unwanted into that product is a very significant
| imposition on the platform.
|
| Also no one lives or eats or breathes on Twitter so the
| notion that they are exercising an online platform the
| same way they would exercise the park on Main Street does
| not follow.
|
| Not to mention the fact that the entire point of the town
| square is that it is a place for discussion of the
| function of the polis with the citizenry of the polis.
| Online social media is a place to consume garbage from
| foreign actors and influencers.
| Clubber wrote:
| >PruneYards was found not to be significantly harmed by
| the expressive activity, because the goal of the
| commercial activity is to sell stuff. But the goal of an
| online social media platform is to curate a coherent
| speech product, and allowing people to insert themselves
| unwanted into that product is a very significant
| imposition on the platform.
|
| That is true but unrelated to the DeSantis law. The
| social media companies obviously don't want to kick kids
| off their platform considering they are a significant
| portion of their audience.
|
| The DeSantis law states the government is mandating that
| social media companies ID everybody. This does have
| precedent though because governments require bars and
| food marts to ID young people for cigarettes, but it's
| different because they are not required to ID
| _everybody_. I 'm not sure they are even required to ID
| people, they can just be prosecuted for selling
| cigarettes and alcohol to minors. I think the ID part was
| just the most convenient way to not get prosecuted.
|
| Of course requiring social media companies to ID
| everybody will have a massive chilling effect on
| political discourse. That might be part of the objective
| or at least a convenient side effect.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| It is related. One poster suggested that the online
| platforms (which are, for a number of reasons previously
| noted, not town squares) are actually more like shopping
| malls. Another post noted that shopping malls (in
| California) can be subject to requirements to allow
| someone else's speech in their area of commerce.
|
| But online platforms are not like shopping malls, because
| online platforms sell advertiser access to a coherent
| speech product, which is distinct from the sale of goods
| in ways that profoundly affect first amendment protection
| of their business.
| Clubber wrote:
| >But online platforms are not like shopping malls,
| because online platforms sell advertiser access to a
| coherent speech product, which is distinct from the sale
| of goods in ways that profoundly affect first amendment
| protection of their business.
|
| But the social media companies aren't the ones who want
| age verification and to kick people off their platforms,
| the government is. The companies want kids in their
| audience, kids want to be in their audience, many parents
| are fine with kids in their audience, it's the government
| of Florida who wants to ban kids.
|
| You seem to be arguing that social media companies should
| be allowed to kick people off their platforms, which
| would trump the individual's free speech. That isn't the
| issue here.
| mbrumlow wrote:
| Even if it was the town square many actual town squares
| require adults to accompany minors. Sure enough if you had
| a bunch of unattended 12 year olds hanging out the cops
| would be called and parents asked to be parents.
|
| Even worse would happen if you left your 6 year old wonder
| around the town square unattended while you went to a
| movie.
| iteria wrote:
| Except that's new too. When I was a kid, I could travel
| wherever I wanted without anyone calling the police on
| me. It was just normal for gangs of elementary schoolers
| to wander about. I'm a millennial, so it wasn't even that
| long ago this was a thing.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It's crazy. We've stopped treating children like children
| and started treating them like babies that need constant
| supervision.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| And once again, it is literally _safer_ now than when we
| were kids. By every crime statistic, it 's safer now than
| ever.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| The issue here has absolutely _nothing_ to do with how it
| affects kids, it has to do with how it affects adults.
| Again: "States are basically requiring identification to
| speak or criticize government in the town square."
|
| The fact that the legislation is intended to affect kids
| is irrelevant if the only legally permitted way to comply
| damages the individual liberties of adults.
| tharmas wrote:
| Bingo!
|
| The whole TikTok affair is about AIPAC wanting to shut
| down a platform that doesnt censor Gaza videos. Has
| nothing to do with Security.
|
| Same with the Patriot Act.
|
| Gotta keep the people "Safe". Gotta keep the kids "Safe".
|
| Its all lies.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not trying to suggest an ulterior motive
| on the part of DeSantis or the Florida legislature. But
| effectively requiring a government ID to exercise free
| speech on the internet damages individual liberty (again,
| of _adults_ ) regardless of whether that's an intended
| effect or not.
| mb7733 wrote:
| >Even if it was the town square many actual town squares
| require adults to accompany minors. Sure enough if you
| had a bunch of unattended 12 year olds hanging out the
| cops would be called and parents asked to be parents.
|
| What? Where is this the case?
| taxyz wrote:
| This has become such a common trope that I think people
| fail to apply even a modicum of scrutiny: the internet is
| not the town square and whatever your idea of the town
| square is likely wrong if you think its as wild-west-y as
| the internet is.
|
| Firstly, try to approach children in the town square while
| wearing a mask for anonymity; or try to hold up images of
| porn in your town square. You will not be there long, you'd
| likely be detained, and you'd likely be asked for
| identification.
|
| Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town
| square? I have lived in several large US cities and several
| small towns. In neither was there any sort of common place
| where we all congregated to address matters of the town. At
| best, there are city hall/city council meetings where the
| public can speak but at least in my town (and I know of
| many others), identification is required to prove that you
| live in the town!
|
| Even the founding fathers, when writing under pseudonyms,
| understood that anonymity and circulation was incumbent
| upon them to maintain, not that they were entitled to it
| because "town square."
|
| To address your last point: this is not simply some ill
| conceived moral panic/think of the children type moment. Go
| try to host - as an adult - an AA meeting or "computer
| meetup" with children that happens to be held in the local
| adult toy shop. See how well that goes for you. At this
| point, we know children are getting approached by adults at
| a large scale on instagram, we know children are getting
| exposed to a lot of adult content on twitter, and on the
| spectrum between innocent HOA meeting and damaging to
| society as a whole, its clearly more towards the latter.
| Clubber wrote:
| >This has become such a common trope that I think people
| fail to apply even a modicum of scrutiny: the internet is
| not the town square
|
| Where is the majority of politics and recent events
| discussed? Where are new ideas shared and accepted or
| rejected? Where is this topic being discussed? Case
| rested.
|
| >Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town
| square?
|
| It's an international phenomenon, probably as old as
| civilizations.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_square
|
| The rest of your post sounds like moral panic.
| taxyz wrote:
| If actual politics reflected sentiment on the internet,
| US politics would look very different. The Overton window
| on the internet is very different from real life, there
| is tremendous bot traffic from outside the US, there are
| people with multiple accounts, and algorithms and "trust
| and safety" rules that promote certain views above
| others. You are confusing signal and noise. The majority
| of politics - that matter - is not discussed online, the
| majority of new ideas are not shared/accepted/rejected
| online - even in a business sense most founders know
| their cofounders personally, not from online chats. Case
| rested.
|
| You idea of the town square is also outdated. Do you
| think the municipal government in Rome still meets at the
| Forum? And you did not address my point that even if it
| did exist as it did in whatever millennium you yearn for,
| would the behavior that is present on the internet be
| tolerated the same way? Was the Forum or Copley or Dock
| square known for adult men showing their genitalia to
| underage women? Your idea of a town square is antiquated
| and likely would not have tolerated the behavior you
| think the internet should just because its the town
| square. Case rested.
|
| > The rest of your post sounds like moral panic.
|
| Nice rebuttal there. If it's just moral panic, why does
| the data suggest that social media use its detrimental to
| adolescents' mental health and well being? Why is the
| effort to curtail social media influence on kids' a
| bipartisan effort in an increasingly partisan society?
| Even the misguided level of libertarianism you're
| probably advocating for understands that short of pure
| anarchy, there are some externalities governments have to
| address, chief among them are social media platforms that
| are evidently harmful to certain parts of society (young
| kids). Case rested.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| "Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town
| square?"
|
| Cities and towns in the US were once often built around
| town squares. Many cities have open public areas like
| this in Europe and South America where people can
| congregate. Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires comes to mind.
| Cities in the US haven't been designed around a central
| town square in a long time, but the term has stuck
| colloquially.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_de_Mayo
|
| Below is a link to William Penn's original plan for
| Philadelphia, where the city would have a five town
| squares, with one in the center of each of four
| quadrants, and the largest in the city center.
| https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gary-
| Libecap/publicatio...
|
| https://lauriephillips.com/philadelphias-five-original-
| squar...
|
| Boston long had a number of town squares, many of which
| no longer exist, such as Haymarket Square.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_Square_(Boston)
| taxyz wrote:
| My point is not that they NEVER existed, its that they no
| longer exist in the capacity most people mean when they
| use the term. As you mentioned, cities used to be
| organized around them. Most people now live in cities
| that are either don't have one at all or don't have one
| that is used in the way they were hundreds of years ago.
|
| Furthermore, the behavior that was tolerated in the town
| square would not be close to what we tolerate online. And
| we don't afford kids the freedom in the real world that
| we do online. I am not sure why people think that
| requiring parental consent or age verification online is
| some sort of assault on personal liberty.
| oliwarner wrote:
| H.B.3 only prohibits these minors holding accounts on social
| media. They can still browse, as can anyone without an account
| and age verification. You'd be able to view a business's
| information, watch videos, etc etc etc, just not create your
| own.
|
| It also has conditions for which sites are affected by this
| law. The site has to have doomscroll and already be popular
| with kids. Google Maps isn't what they're targeting.
|
| Honestly, mixed feelings. I'm in no rush to show Zuck my
| passport but the flagrant grooming comments on _every_ kid 's
| TikTok account is enough to show there's a significant problem,
| even if this isn't the right answer.
| jiayo wrote:
| How many social media sites allow you to do anything without
| an account? Twitter used to be wide open but X competely
| locked down. Instagram lets you click 2 things and then the
| paywall pops up. I'm not sure about Facebook but it isn't
| much better.
| appplication wrote:
| Without speaking to merits, the entire point of this law is
| to reduce usage by minors. So being able to do less without
| an account is a feature through this lens.
| pests wrote:
| The question was about merits though, you can't just
| ignore the question.
|
| How do teenagers find and discover businesses when they
| are locked behind a sign up wall for social media?
| wpasc wrote:
| This is an unfair parallel, but it's like worrying about
| businesses who advertise on pornographic sites or on
| cigarette boxes. Allowing visibility to businesses who
| advertise on a certain platform could be judged (by
| society, law, and voters) to be outweighed by the need to
| restrict youth access to social media. There is a variety
| of precedent in society and law in restricting youth
| access to something that is otherwise deemed legal. Just
| because businesses advertise on social media (in my
| opinion), the decision to restrict access should not be
| altered by that advertising strategy.
| pests wrote:
| They don't advertise on FB, they host their main web
| presence on FB.
|
| That's like saying you go to Pornhub to buy Manscaped
| Hair Trimmers. You don't. They _advertise_ on PH, but
| that's not where you buy them at.
|
| Why is everyone replying to me about ads? Who said
| anything about ads?
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > How do teenagers find and discover businesses when they
| are locked behind a sign up wall for social media?
|
| Why is this even a problem?
|
| Oh no, businesses can't target advertising directly at
| children?
| pests wrote:
| Who said anything about advertising?
|
| This is about businesses using Facebook as their main
| website. Where do ads come in?
|
| Are teenagers not real people or something? They don't
| buy things or shop?
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Kids can "find businesses" the way they always have
| pests wrote:
| Like, with ads? That you were so against above. What's
| wrong with them going to a businesses online presence?
| jandrese wrote:
| It will be interesting for businesses like restaurants
| that don't have paper menus but have you scan a code that
| opens an IG with their menu in an album. Frankly, I
| applaud the state for eliminating this use case.
| goykasi wrote:
| Twitter required a login long before the rename or Elon
| owned it. He actually removed that restriction for a while
| before reenabling it.
|
| And with some simple div removal, IG doesnt require a login
| to view content. This is true about a lot of the paywalled
| sites.
| kennywinker wrote:
| That doesn't sound true to me... Idk specific policies,
| but my experience was that I was never logged in to
| twitter on my desktop and I was never login-walled out
| until recently under elon.
|
| edit: https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/tech/twitter-public-
| access-re...
|
| > People without a Twitter account or who weren't logged
| in used to be able to scroll the platform's homepage and
| view public accounts and tweets. But as of this week,
| when such a user opens the platform they are met with a
| screen prompting them to sign up or sign in to Twitter.
| goykasi wrote:
| Ive never had a twitter account. And I was definitely not
| able to view most content during the pandemic.
|
| from 2021: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/
| pa6dra/twitter... and from 2022:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615371
| dangus wrote:
| What I'm really unclear about is whether providers are
| required to use an actual ID to age verify. Does anyone know?
|
| The bill summary on the Florida senate webpage says:
|
| > Such commercial entities must verify, using either an
| anonymous or standard age verification method, that the age
| of a person attempting to access the material harmful to
| minors satisfies the bill's age requirements.
|
| It sounds to me like "anonymous age verification method"
| could just mean that the website asks how old you are? What
| constitutes verification here? That sentence makes it sound
| like they can choose to use whatever feeble method they want.
|
| At face value this law seems like political points being
| scored by passing a widely popular law that changes very
| little in practice (bumping the minimum age from 13 to 14).
| somethingreen wrote:
| Anonymous verification could be something like OAuth.
| Government run or certified probably. You'd need to provide
| an ID to OAuth provider once, but the actual service
| requesting verification would get as little as your age and
| email.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The last thing we need is to force everyone to have ID to
| "protect the children" before I can go on to a site on the
| internet.
| consumer451 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_papers,_please
| oliwarner wrote:
| Which is not what anyone is calling for.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| What? That's _literally what we are talking about_!
| oliwarner wrote:
| No, we're talking about stopping children having social
| media accounts.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| And how do you know they're not a child?
|
| Bars do it by having you show an id.
|
| Online pot dispensaries do it by having you upload an id.
|
| Texas expects porn sites to do it by having you upload an
| id.
|
| How does Florida expect a site to do it?
|
| This is a legitimate question that I want the answer to.
| Presumably "check this box" isn't going to cut it. So if
| it's not the most common way to enforce an actual legal
| restriction, then what is it?
| Brybry wrote:
| There's really no need for ID checking. Most porn sites
| already self-regulated by marking their content adult
| with meta tags/headers.
|
| Parental control software picks up on that. [1]
|
| Social media could do the same thing: make a social media
| adults-only meta tag for parental control software to
| use.
|
| For the parents that care, and use parental control
| software, the ID laws won't stop their kids running into
| porn. The porn their kids are going to encounter is going
| to be on non-porn sites like twitter or reddit (or small
| sites that don't care about these laws anyway).
|
| Maybe we needed a bigger push for more awareness or
| better parental control software but the ID law push is
| weird and unamerican to me.
|
| [1] https://www.rtalabel.org/
| wvenable wrote:
| > Parental control software picks up on that. [1]
|
| That's client side. This law specifically makes this a
| server-side issue; the service cannot let a minor make an
| account.
|
| How do you do that without ID?
| ziddoap wrote:
| How do you imagine that will be enforced? Perhaps by...
| ID?
|
| Do you have another method to prove age? One that doesn't
| require ID, and can be implemented as of today?
| tristan957 wrote:
| Pornhub just blocked Texas. We are very much using
| children as an excuse for big government.
| bear141 wrote:
| "Think of the children!!!" Has been used for a very very
| long time to enact terrible laws and quietly remove rights.
| It is everywhere you look.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Right, definitely wouldn't want that. But do we just have
| to accept the negative impact the internet can have on
| children as a necessary evil then?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| So you would be okay giving your ID to Facebook or any
| other site before you can access it?
| knightoffaith wrote:
| No, I wouldn't. I'm just wondering if we have to accept
| the consequences for children or if there's some
| alternative solution.
| krapp wrote:
| If we have to accept the negative impact of bullets in
| our childrens' bodies from spree killers and cops as a
| necessary evil to preserve the Second Amendment then yes,
| we should accept the negative impact of the internet as a
| necessary evil to preserve the First.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Kids-only internet (moderated by child development phds,
| idk) you need specific, cheap hardware to access. Less
| walled garden, more sandbox. It wouldn't be a place for
| entrepreneurs.
|
| Registration and access maintained at the county level or
| smaller so that community standards and relationships shape
| adoption and use.
|
| Low age cutoff with actual adults trying to connect put in
| jail and on a list.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I'm struggling to parse anything you said.
| bananapub wrote:
| > You'd be able to view a business's information, watch
| videos, etc etc etc, just not create your own.
|
| so...everyone - that Facebook or whatever considers to be in
| Florida - has to provide ID to post, then?
| morkalork wrote:
| This is not true! I was looking at a hair salon and bakery
| recently. Both, being run by millennials, have nothing but a
| google maps listing and an Instagram account. But I don't
| have one and after looking at a few photos of cakes and
| hairstyles, it gives me the boot and asks me to sign in to
| see more! Adding mandatory government ID to that is crazy.
| rokkitmensch wrote:
| Anything that contributes to funnel friction for those
| wreckers is a social net positive in my book.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| They sound like incompetent business proprietors. When did
| having a website become something exclusively for old
| people? Millennials are in their 30s and 40s.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > When did having a website become something exclusively
| for old people?
|
| It's more that having a website never became a thing for
| many businesses in the first place. 30 years ago they
| might have had a listing in the phone book. Nowadays that
| kind of business might have a facebook page, or more
| recently an instagram account. Creating a website (even
| with something like wix) requires a level of skill and
| effort above that.
| smallerfish wrote:
| They're just being cheap. Facebook is free (and
| "everybody has Facebook") whereas Wix and Squarespace are
| $12-$15/mo for businesses.
| groby_b wrote:
| Their competence is measured by their success, not your
| opinions. And it turns out that in many professions, an
| insta is the thing you need for success.
|
| If you don't like it, that's your problem, not theirs.
| You're part of a small enough group they don't care
| about. I'm not sure how that's an age question in the
| first place, though. The "being run by millenials"
| throwaway by GP is just... well, at best, sloppy
| thinking.
|
| There are GenZ businesses websiting, there are boomers
| insta-ing. You pick the tool for your niche.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Instagram gives you like half a scroll.
|
| Facebook is more generous.
| darby_eight wrote:
| That's kind of on Instagram for forcing you to log in--I
| certainly never use the site to look at anything. Google
| maps certainly doesn't require this.
|
| Regardless, I won't bemoan the demise of either business.
| We need something simpler to drive traffic.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| > I'm in no rush to show Zuck my passport
|
| I agree, but I think your problem isn't Zuck, it's with
| passports.
|
| Government issued licences aren't fit for purpose any more.
| They were when all you did with your paper drivers licence is
| show it to the police, but now they've become a form of ID
| you show man+dog who gets to scrape a whole pile of into from
| it that can be used to track you. For example, they can
| follow your passport number or drivers licence to connect a
| series of what should look like unrelated transactions.
|
| As an example, now when a car rental company wants to know
| you have a valid licence they demand a copy of it. If you
| have an accident they use the copy to prove they verified you
| are licenced to drive, if you do something illegal they can
| hand over your ID so the police can chase you down. FIDO /
| WebAuthn / PassKey shows how those things can be achieved
| without leaking all the information on the licence. It can
| hand over a one time token saying you have a valid licence
| and signed by something that chains back to a public key held
| by the government. The token reveals nothing more than that
| to the car hire firm, but should they hand it over to the
| police they can decrypt it to identify you.
|
| These tokens are useless if stolen. They can't link you to
| other transactions and don't identify you in any way, and yet
| are far more secure than a bunch of unsigned pixels. In other
| words unlike a copy of a passport, mostly harmless.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| I suspect more businesses will create a separate website
| because of this law, so you'll have even less reason to use
| Facebook or whip out your ID.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > I already didn't want a Facebook account just to see a
| businesses specials
|
| Hopefully this will make that problem less prevalent.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| Imagine if all those sites weren't social but could just
| provide the info. And business would have regular website and
| not parasite Facebook page...
| smackeyacky wrote:
| I don't bother with businesses that only have a Facebook
| account when I'm searching. I'm sure there are dozens of us
| doing the same.
| adrr wrote:
| Apple, Google or any other trusted provider could do anonymous
| attestation of being over a certain age. Apple already has the
| framework in safari to attest that you aren't a bot.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| Google is the last company I would trust with that kind of
| data
| evantbyrne wrote:
| Pretty wild to watch the basic rights of people in red states
| backslide in real time. Now there is the (what should be
| unnecessary) legal question of whether you can even run a social
| media platform with anonymous users in the state of Florida.
| Needing de facto governmental verification to communicate with
| people on the internet is something I had hoped I would never
| live to see in America. Hopefully it will not be fully enforced
| to the letter of the law.
| lolinder wrote:
| There isn't really such a question. The law explicitly requires
| anonymous third-party age verification to be offered as an
| option. There are definitely concerns about how well that will
| work in practice, and I would definitely want to wait and see
| how it works in Florida before advocating for a wider rollout,
| but this Florida bill is actually the most reasonable of these
| age verification requirements rolled out to date.
|
| I'm all for a healthy skepticism of government intervention,
| but my feeling is let's let Florida try this out and see what
| happens.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| If you think kids won't route around this then you don't know
| kids. Its a political move for desantis to rally his base,
| nothing more.
| lolinder wrote:
| Like I said, let's wait and see. I don't expect _all_ kids
| to keep off social media--not all kids stay away from
| alcohol either--what I 'd hope is that a significant enough
| percentage of them stay off that kids who do stay off have
| an easier time setting up healthier interaction patterns
| among their friend groups.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| The more insidious undertone is that Florida is (or is
| establishing legal precedence for) policing information
| access.
|
| If anything is detrimental to the health of a child, it's a
| restricted worldview.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| You say there is no question, but it is already being raised
| by social media companies as an issue with the law. Anonymous
| age _verification_ is not something that exists. This
| requires government documentation, which means any solution
| that involves storing identity verification information would
| de facto allow the government to unmask users. This raises
| serious free speech concerns for everyone that uses these
| websites in Florida.
| lolinder wrote:
| 1) 3rd party service (Verifier) receives government
| documentation proving that the owner of {{account ID}} is
| over the age of 21.
|
| 2) Verifier records the fact that the owner of {{account
| ID}} has proven they are of the age of majority. They throw
| away all other identifying information, including their
| exact age.
|
| 3) The individual logs in to Verifier from Social Media.
| Verifier certifies to Social Media that the individual is
| over the age of majority.
|
| There's no technical barrier preventing this outcome, and
| if you read the text of the law this is very clearly what
| the legislature envisions. Will it work? I don't know.
| Let's wait and see.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| Let's just ignore the fact this doesn't exist for the
| sake of going through the mental exercise. Whether
| identity services are allowed to discard the logs is a
| legal question. The time in which a user makes a
| verification request for a website is de-anonymizing in
| of itself. The government could access both services
| either in real-time (remember this has already happened
| here) or depending on how things are stored at a later
| date to link identities to accounts. So the government
| has ways get all the information it needs to de-anonymize
| people who use social media in Florida if enforced.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| You skipped over the Verifier expecting to be paid in
| some manner, being very likely to be paid using credit
| card, and thus having to retain those logs. Thus still
| making it easy to unmask users.
| lolinder wrote:
| Social Media company would probably be the one to pay
| Verifier.
| nerdawson wrote:
| A fairly basic version of anonymous verification would be
| that local stores sell an age token. You show them your ID,
| like you would for buying alcohol, and they give you the
| token which could then be used with online services to
| prove you're over a certain age.
|
| It only becomes a problem if stores are forced to store the
| ID and link it to the token in some way.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Teenagers are gonna be stoked when they can pick up their
| internet access chip AND alcohol in one stop
| dbbk wrote:
| "Anonymous third-party age verification" is an oxymoron. You
| can't verify age anonymously.
| thrownaway561 wrote:
| The biggest thing about social media is that it NEVER stops.
| Growing up, if you had trouble with bullying at school, it ended
| when you went home, your home was your safe zone. Now there are
| no safe zones.
|
| not only that, but i fully believe that kids are WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY
| to impressionable and influenceable. there is a reason kids can't
| do a lot of things until 18 (even through the brain doesn't fully
| develop till 25). kids should not be influenced by social media
| to be doing permanent things that could harm themselves (like
| gender transitioning, getting a tatoo or piercing, or doing
| something dangerous challege) or their future careers (like
| breaking the law so they have a criminal record).
|
| honestly social media is a wonderful thing, but something has to
| be done. i personally believe that parents need to have more
| power in discipling their children. i don't like the fact that
| laws like this have to be created, but i see that they have to
| exists with the more power they take away from the parents.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > if you had trouble with bullying at school, it ended when you
| went home, your home was your safe zone.
|
| I went to school just at the cusp of digital bullying. A yahoo
| group was set up specifically to bully one kid in my class. It
| was shut down by yahoo, but I think because it was hosting
| porn, not because it was mostly designed for bullying people.
|
| This was in the days of shared computers, and no real
| notifications. Now the bully is in your pocket.
|
| I don't know what the equitable answer is. out right banning is
| wrong. But we do need to significantly more to allow people to
| escape bullying.
| paxys wrote:
| Right, Florida teenagers are totally not going to use social
| media after this law. It's like everyone commenting on this
| thread was born yesterday.
|
| This is a form of government control on your devices and
| eyeballs, nothing else. And considering it is effectively
| impossible to enforce, the state is soon going to start suing all
| the tech companies they don't like and push further
| restrictions/censorship.
| Clubber wrote:
| >Right, Florida teenagers are totally not going to use social
| media after this law. It's like everyone commenting on this
| thread was born yesterday.
|
| I mean they banned drugs and that totally worked, right?
|
| /s
| toyg wrote:
| It was already de-facto illegal for people under 13 to have
| social accounts. Do you know any kids younger than that on social
| media? I do.
|
| This is the equivalent of paper bags for beer cans - it will do
| nothing to fix the problem, but it will make children slightly
| more secretive about their internet usage, which will make some
| situations (grooming, bullying) even worse.
| bequanna wrote:
| > Do you know any kids younger than that on social media? I do.
|
| That isn't really how laws work. You don't say: "Driving under
| the influence is illegal, but I totally know people who drink
| and drive so the law is useless".
|
| A solution doesn't need to be 100% effective for it to be
| hugely beneficial to society.
| toyg wrote:
| The point is that the pre-existing law was already completely
| ineffective. This one will be no better.
|
| One can restrict consuming a resource only if one has means
| to police such restrictions. Unless you agree to draconian
| measures, like having all browsers under police control at
| all times, there is no real way to police web access by age.
| generalizations wrote:
| I like this. We'll get another generation of anti-authoritarian
| hackers. These kids will learn to circumvent the laws, and the
| process will improve both their skills and their philosophy.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| Pains me as it does to admit it, I'm OK with this, and I'm so
| glad that I grew up in an age before TikTok existed.
|
| Social media in its current form is designed to be as addictive
| as possible as a method of revenue generation. That's it. The
| more time we spend on these apps, the more money they make.
| Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are designed from the ground-up
| to take as much time and attention as possible by using the same
| tricks that slot machines use. This is well-known and well-
| documented amongst _people like us_ who work in tech. It's less
| well-known outside our bubble.
|
| Plenty of adults are unable to break the curse of the endless
| scroll, so what chance do children have?
|
| It is, in my opinion, as dangerous as cigarettes, and we don't
| allow 11-year-olds to buy those. I don't know if a ban is the way
| to go, but something's gotta change.
| CivBase wrote:
| I was curious how the bill defines "social media" since it is a
| vague term. Here's the bill:
| https://m.flsenate.gov/session/bill/2024/3/billtext/er/pdf
|
| The definition starts near the bottom of page 3.
|
| Seems to me like this criteria would be hard to prove and easy
| for platforms to game:
|
| > Ten percent or more of the daily active users who are younger
| than 16 years of age spend on average 2 hours per day or longer
| on the online forum, website, or application on the days when
| using the online forum, website, or application during the
| previous 12 months or, if the online forum, website, or
| application did not exist during the previous 12 months, during
| the previous month;
|
| Anyone know why that criteria even exists in the first place?
| redserk wrote:
| I think this adds an incredible amount of risk to almost any US-
| based social media site, big or small, regardless of which state
| you're in.
|
| You can't 100.0% block all Floridians from accessing your site,
| especially with GeoIP databases. This means someone who is close
| enough to the border of Alabama or Georgia with an IP address
| reportedly in another state could easily find reason to sue you.
|
| And because you're in the US, you can easily be made to show up
| in a costly court battle over state lines.
|
| This is horrifying news for small/medium sized social media
| sites.
| Hugsun wrote:
| The bill seems to be targeting certain types of social media
| platforms. I'm not sure everyone is at risk. What small/medium
| sites do you have in mind? HN doesn't seem to be a target for
| example.
| redserk wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer so I'll happily accept a more thorough
| analysis.
|
| My quick reading of the bill leads me to think that smaller
| forums might actually qualify -- unless I missed a section on
| size of social network.
|
| This bill says:
|
| (I apologize for the incredibly bad formatting below, I've
| edited a few times to try to get things right)
|
| > A social media site must fufill the criteria:
|
| > ...
|
| > 2. Ten percent or more of the daily active users who are
| younger than 16 years of age spend on average 2 hours per day
| or longer on the online forum, website, or application on the
| days when using the online forum, website, or application
| during the previous 12 months or, if the online forum,
| website, or application did not exist during the previous 12
| months, during the previous month;
|
| ...when I was in high school, I spent a filthy amount of time
| on online tech forums. If Hackernews were around back then, I
| would've likely been on it for 2+ hours just reading random
| links.
|
| > 3. Employs algorithms that analyze user data or information
| on users to select content for users; and
|
| >
|
| > 4. Has any of the following addictive features:
|
| > a. Infinite scrolling, which means either:
|
| > (I) Continuously loading content, or content that loads as
| the user scrolls down the page without the need to open a
| separate page; or
|
| > (II) Seamless content, or the use of pages with no visible
| or apparent end or page breaks.
|
| > b. Push notifications or alerts sent by the online forum,
| website, or application to inform a user about specific
| activities or events related to the user's account
|
| > c. Displays personal interactive metrics that indicate the
| number of times other users have clicked a button to indicate
| their reaction to content or have shared or reposted the
| content.
|
| So... any algorithm that selects "hot/active" content based
| on views+interaction, upvotes or emails about people who
| reply to your comments.
|
| Now combine this with:
|
| > When taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic,
| political, or scientific value for minors.
|
| So what defines "serious literary, artistic, political, or
| scientific value for minors"? This seems like something that
| might be applied on very arbitrary grounds and won't require
| much to trigger it.
|
| https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/3/BillText/er/PDF
| thiht wrote:
| I hope for them a "social media" is well defined, because it gets
| blurrier as years pass.
| tharmas wrote:
| I find it disturbing that both political parties seem to be
| goose-stepping towards Authoritarianism albeit for different
| Ideological reasons.
| zafka wrote:
| I feel that more than anything this is a subsidy for all of
| Desantis's lawyer friends - paid for by residents of Florida.
| While Florida was an odd state when I moved here 40 years ago, it
| has become more surreal at an accelerating pace. I wonder if the
| simulation has a local glitch.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| The recent World Happiness Report[0] concluded:
|
| > In many but not all regions, the young are happier than the
| old. But in North America happiness has fallen so sharply for the
| young that they are now less happy than the old. By contrast, in
| the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the young
| are much happier than the old. In Western Europe as a whole
| happiness is similar at all ages, while elsewhere it tends to
| decline over the life cycle (with an occasional upturn for the
| old).
|
| I think social media is a red herring. For whatever reason, young
| people in America are unhappy and instead if dealing with hard
| problems we think "let's just take social media away, that will
| fix it". Does Finland not have social media? Why are young people
| in Finland happier than they are in America?
|
| I predict this trend will continue, we will take social media
| away from kids and they will still be unhappy as they look for
| things to do in their small apartment while mom and dad look at
| their cell phones.
|
| [0]: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/happiness-and-age-
| summ...
| ericmcer wrote:
| I have a 14 year old and the content of social media seems to
| be what bums her out. She seems to be ingrained with the idea
| that she will never own a home, environmental disasters will be
| constant and the economy will be in shambles by the time she
| reaches adulthood.
|
| Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media
| environment? I have not read any kind of large scale studies
| examining the "tone" of social media feeds in different
| countries but that would be interesting.
|
| * Also whenever she says stuff like that I respond by letting
| her know she will be able to buy a house if she wants one, the
| economy will always be good for people who are work smart and
| hard, etc.
| psadauskas wrote:
| > she will be able to buy a house if she wants one, the
| economy will always be good for people who are work smart and
| hard, etc.
|
| Yeah, I don't think that's true at all. Its just anecdata,
| but I have several friends in their 30s for which that's just
| not the case. They're smart and work (harder than I do, just
| not in tech), but the price of a down payment on a home is
| going up faster than they're able to save, and they already
| live relatively frugally. We live in a major metro area, not
| a particularly expensive one, but the same is true for most
| of my cousins in the same age range spread across the
| country.
|
| I feel like my age group (mid 40s) is the last one that could
| afford home ownership, and me only because I got lucky by
| working in tech. Other people I know that are better educated
| and work harder than me are just shut out of the housing
| market, without some kind of windfall.
| floxy wrote:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=conventional+97+mortgage&i
| a...
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Is it easy to find one that doesn't require private
| mortgage insurance? I remember that being a sticking
| point when I looked into this in the past few years.
|
| The problem I see with requiring such insurance is that
| I'd already be paying whatever interest rate on a higher
| loan amount for the same 15- or 30-year period and it's
| rather insulting when a high credit score isn't a signal
| that the loan is low risk. How many years of literally 0
| late bill payments do I need before I can reasonably
| expect a bank to assume that I won't miss the payments
| that I sign up for? (Undefined, unless one has the 20% up
| front, then 0.) It's a bit of a joke.
|
| Anyway, I guess that got a bit rant-y; just saying that
| this feels more like exploitation by banks than banks
| offering a reasonable option. It lowers one's purchasing
| power unless one is able to save for a down payment.
| floxy wrote:
| I didn't know I was supposed to be insulted by PMI, so I
| just paid it.
| ericmcer wrote:
| You are totally right housing prices have skyrocketed
| relative to wages, but you cant just tell kids they are
| doomed. There have always been good times and hard times
| and there are always people who succeed or fail regardless.
| smileysteve wrote:
| > but you cant just tell kids they are doomed
|
| But you can expose them to broader view points;
|
| Why is owning a house a goal, or dilemma that would lead
| to depression? This is perhaps the "American" part; how
| many countries is home and automobile ownership a top
| coming of age marker?
|
| Environmental disasters are going to happen (especially
| in top article of Florida) how can a kid take part
| through volunteering or voting for non disaster policies?
|
| Economic disaster ^^ see above ^^ but yes, America has
| not grasped with demographic shift with baby boomer
| retirements; and a future lack of workers; this is where
| parents can teach children self sufficiency.
| boredpeter wrote:
| Owning a home is a goal because the alternative is
| lifetime wage slavery to fund a landlord's lavish
| lifestyle.
|
| People don't want to be exploited and see home ownership
| as a way to get out of that cycle of exploitation and
| building enough wealth to someday retire.
| robocat wrote:
| Paying mortgage interest is even worse slavery in my
| limited experience. A mortgage really ties you down.
|
| > building enough wealth
|
| Our current environment looks like that if you are older.
| Thinking of your house as savings is weird: personally I
| think you need a house and retirement savings - and safe
| retirement savings is an oxymoron because it depends on
| the demographics and economy.
|
| I'm not sure that younger people can rely on the idea
| that their house will be worth enough because it depends
| on population demographics - housing is a Ponzi scheme
| where the older population sells there home to younger
| people until at some point the youngest person risks
| being left with something worthless: Japan and Italy have
| houses for Y=0 or EUR1 due to aging population.
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/travel/patrica-italy-town-one-
| euro-h...
| neuralRiot wrote:
| The background problem of all this is what have been
| ingrained in our culture that money = success =
| happiness. Is not that they will or will not own a house,
| a car or a yatch, is the sense that they will never be
| able to be happy if they don't get any of those. How many
| people follow careers that they are not interested in the
| least but they have "growth potential" or are a "path to
| success". Now on top of that they see in social media
| people who "have everything" and are living the life and
| smiling 24/7 and they don't understand that everything is
| just a show, books, radio, movies, tv, youtube it's all
| the same, reality is on this side of the screen not in
| that.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I'm not sure if you intended it or not, but it reads like
| a justification of the Nobel Lie[1].
|
| I don't think the truth can be contained once it's out.
| Truth, of course, wins out in the end.
|
| 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie
| squigz wrote:
| > but you cant just tell kids they are doomed
|
| Lying to them when they can see the evidence to the
| contrary is better?
| ericmcer wrote:
| I approach life thinking that I should do the best for
| myself and my family regardless of what broad societal
| problems are. I want to raise my kids to be the same way.
| There is no way I am going to raise them thinking they
| should just quit.
|
| It isn't a lie, I don't know what the future will be but
| I know there will be people who thrive and people who
| wither.
| wvenable wrote:
| > There have always been good times and hard times and
| there are always people who succeed or fail regardless.
|
| That is a weird statement. What does it mean when times
| are good or bad then?
|
| If times are bad, and it feels like they are, then less
| people are going to succeed. I'm not sure pretending that
| problems don't exist improves your odds of being in the
| succeed category.
| floxy wrote:
| "I returned to civilization shortly after that and went
| to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very
| strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt
| very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York,
| for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I
| began to think, you know, about how much the radius of
| the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far
| from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all
| smashed -- and so on. And I would go along and I would
| see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new
| road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't
| understand, they don't understand. Why are they making
| new things? It's so useless.
|
| But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty
| years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being
| useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people
| had the sense to go ahead."
|
| -- Richard Feynman
| RegBarclay wrote:
| I'll add my own anecdata here. My older kids are in their
| late 20s and one has bought a home and the other is buying
| a new build home this year.
|
| My youngest is 18, the greatest consumer of social media of
| my 4 children, and she's convinced she won't be able to buy
| a home like her under-30 siblings are doing right now.
|
| Sounds very much like a YMMV situation, but it feels like
| social media has influenced my youngest to believe
| otherwise.
| floxy wrote:
| If someone is convinced that all housing is going to
| stay/become extravagantly expensive, shouldn't they get
| into real estate development to cash in on the
| opportunity? So they can build houses/condos/etc. Seems
| like they could become architects, or real estate agents,
| or work for (or own) a construction company. Maybe
| designing robots that build houses. Or work for a REIT.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I notice a distinct lack of jobs like plumber or
| carpenter in that list. In some sense my parents are home
| builders (I'd say it's like a hobby for them), so I have
| some familiarity with the process. I even fill in some of
| the labor on occasion. It really doesn't require a lot of
| administrative work (though they avoid building in places
| with lots of codes at this point), but a ton of low-paid
| labor. I don't think any amount of money could ever get
| me to do concrete work, and pretty much every job sucks
| in South Texas in the summer, but roofing is the worst on
| that count. Plumbing and electrician probably pay a bit
| better at least, but it's still work that is often done
| by immigrants, so there is some competition.
| floxy wrote:
| I hesitated to use the word "construction" on purpose,
| because invariably someone on HN chimes in how back
| breaking manual labor is and how it wears out your body
| prematurely, etc.. :)
|
| >I don't think any amount of money could ever get me to
| do concrete work
|
| How complex is that work? Might it be a good candidate
| for machines/robots?
| silverquiet wrote:
| I'd think if it was amenable to mechanization, that would
| have happened in the last century or so. I distinctly
| remember Mike Rowe doing the job on his show "Dirty Jobs"
| so that might be worth looking up if you want a good
| picture of it.
|
| There's plenty of machines involved to transport concrete
| via trucks and pumps and all that, but it always seems to
| end up with some grunt holding the nozzle and then lots
| of labor to ensure there are no voids and the surface is
| smooth.
|
| I don't really know that much about robots, but the thing
| about houses is that nothing is really terribly exact -
| lots of stuff is just off by half an inch or something
| like that, so a lot of the work just ends up being
| somewhat custom. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing
| robots would handle well.
|
| Maybe there's more room for it in prefab type
| construction? But of course there's a mobile home stigma
| there.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I am an adult and I have the same concerns. Went to a top
| university, got a decent job, found a partner who also has a
| decent job and don't use social media much. Still don't think
| we would be able to own a home for a while, every time we get
| close to the financial ability to buy a house, the goal post
| moves. The economy has always been up and down. We've both
| seen harsh times economically when companies let people go on
| a whim. Healthcare is a nightmare. You could have a good
| job/health insurance most of your life and could be out of
| one for just a couple months, and if an incident happens in
| that period, you set yourself back by years in terms of
| savings. The environment keeps getting worse, considering we
| actually saw the things get worse in the last 30 years with
| our own eyes. There is just a perpetual fight to keep your
| quality of life consistent. Working hard and smart is no
| longer enough.
| ttt3ts wrote:
| > Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media
| environment?
|
| You might have something here. Given the other responses to
| your post which are largely unrelated but undeniably
| depressing. Now I have to go see if such a study exists...
| silverquiet wrote:
| I don't know if I'm that smart, but I worked as hard as I
| could at my last tech job and still got laid off. Do own a
| house, but it was basically a gift from the parents - maybe
| you can buy your daughter one too?
| jrflowers wrote:
| > She seems to be ingrained with the idea that she will never
| own a home, environmental disasters will be constant and the
| economy will be in shambles by the time she reaches
| adulthood.
|
| This is very troubling. Without social media teens would have
| to hear those things from their elders and peers in person or
| read about them elsewhere on the internet
| userabchn wrote:
| > Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media
| environment?
|
| Perhaps America is a bigger target than other countries for
| foreign influence operations that seek to cause division and
| depression using social media.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Perhaps America was a uniquely divided society from the
| very beginning? Either that, or foreign influence
| operations have been a multigenerational affairs - which
| year or decade could one say America was not divided?
| joemazerino wrote:
| This and this again. Tiktok is a foreign influence machine
| on its own and it is wrecking havoc across the West.
| Compare Western Tiktok to Chinese Tiktok and see the
| difference for yourself.
| mk89 wrote:
| Let's take TikTok down. I am all for it.
|
| Let's also take Facebook and Instagram down, though.
|
| Bad propaganda from China that makes our kids depressed
| is as bad as the same bad propaganda from an American
| company. And Facebook stopped being a place to make
| friends a long time ago.
| DougN7 wrote:
| I think my 25 year old son had bought into the same thought
| pattern. I'm trying to help, but parents are often thought to
| be clueless.
|
| Having said that, I've found FOMO hitting me hard when
| looking at Facebook posts, so I've stopped looking, and
| feeling better.
| fulafel wrote:
| Not sure we should be trying to fix away awareness of the
| climate crisis, which seems to be a blind spot for most older
| people preventing the democratic process from taking the
| needed drastic actions.
|
| (Same could be said for the increasing economic inequality
| despite record GDP, though it's more survivable near term)
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think these two things are in conflict. Drastic action on
| the climate will almost certainly make most people's lives
| harder (at least in the short term) and will probably be
| tougher on the poor than the rich - for examples food price
| increases due to higher energy costs. Once you get down to
| the nuts and bolts of the changes needed, it's a tough sell
| to those already struggling.
| rhelz wrote:
| If you include all the externalities, fossils fuels are
| the most expensive, not the least expensive, of the
| alternatives we have today.
|
| > Drastic action on the climate will almost certainly
| make most people's lives harder
|
| The human body cools itself by evaporation of sweat. This
| mechanism stops working at 95 degrees F at 100% humidity,
| or at 115 degrees with 50% humidity. Last summer in
| southern Indiana, where I live, we have _a week_ of over
| 100 degrees /50% humidity.
|
| Recall, if you have a temperature of 103 degrees, they
| recommend you see a doctor immediately. Over 108 degrees
| and you risk brain damage.
|
| And currently the world is warming at the rate of just
| over 1/3 of a degree per decade. Drastic action? The most
| drastic thing we could be doing is nothing.
|
| Solar is already cheaper than coal, and the price of
| solar panels is following a Moore's law like curve. Wind
| farms aren't far behind, and they've already saved
| Texas's bacon a couple of times.
|
| It doesn't matter how many social media sites they shut
| down, kids are going to be depressed because nobody seems
| to take the problems their generation are going to face
| seriously.
| api wrote:
| "Never own a home."
|
| As I say at every opportunity: it's housing prices.
|
| Housing prices are the #1 reason for youth "doom and gloom"
| about their economic future, at least in many Western
| countries and especially anglosphere countries.
|
| Social media doesn't help, especially for teens (and it's
| apparently worse for girls), but it's not the only or even
| main cause.
| astrodust wrote:
| "I respond by letting her know she will be able to buy a
| house if she wants one..."
|
| Guess you haven't mentioned that Santa isn't real, either.
| viraptor wrote:
| > by letting her know she will be able to buy a house if she
| wants one
|
| It should be easy to prove, right? Run the numbers for median
| income at specific age, house costs, interest, inflation,
| etc. for your area. If it's obviously affordable, you can
| show it. Depending on the location, you may not like the
| answer though... That fear is not completely made up, you
| know?
|
| I guess most of us are waiting for that inevitable bubble
| pop, but... you know the saying about irrational markets.
|
| > environmental disasters will be constant
|
| The way things are going and with our response... yeah, I
| worry the same. At this point just the inertia of the system
| will make things worse for close to a decade, even if we get
| much better. It's a valid worry.
|
| If you're saying to her you're basically ignoring those
| possibilities, that's unlikely to help with being worried.
| rhelz wrote:
| > I respond by letting her know she will be able to buy a
| house if she wants one
|
| I assume she's good at math? I'm sure she's solved way harder
| math problems than calculating how long it will take to save
| up a $200k down payment when you make $4k a month and pay 80%
| of that in rent and taxes.
|
| > the economy will always be good for people who are work
| smart and hard,
|
| Ummm....well, if that's been your experience, God bless you
| man. But you are writing a check you can't cash if you say it
| will be true of your daughter's generation.
|
| Is it really even a good idea to emphasize hard work? My
| teachers/parents always said if I worked hard enough I would
| succeed, but man, this has only made me work 50, then 60,
| then 80 hours a week, desperately trying to turn an
| inherently doomed project into a success.
|
| I've worked waaaay harder on my failures than on my success.
| That one time I was competing with a team of 5 russian
| Ph.D.'s to see whose software library would go into the
| product. That one time at a startup, where I found out too
| late that the founder always fires all his workers before
| their stock options vest.
|
| Even my failed marriage!! I worked harder trying to keep
| things together than I ever worked on anything. With my
| current wife its not work at all. If you just tell your
| daughter that hard work will always ensure success, you are
| just setting her up for serial burnout after burnout.
|
| If you are working hard, that's not a sign you are winning,
| its a sign you are losing.
|
| And blaming it on social media is just shooting the
| messenger.
| ericmcer wrote:
| You are really ignoring that I put smart before hard.
|
| Sorry things haven't gone your way though, I am kinda
| surprised someone could have been in tech for > 10 years
| and not have significant savings, stock, real estate or
| something built up.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Lying to her like that will probably undermine her trust in
| you going forward. I understand that you mean well, and
| sometimes we have to lie to kids about things that are too
| complex for them to understand, but this doesn't sound like
| one of these cases. It might be more effective to gently
| massage the truth so that it's compatible with the negativity
| she's digested, i.e. 'here's what's being done to manage the
| climate, here's the measures that are keeping the economy in
| good shape'.
| oglop wrote:
| Interesting young populations bordering all too real conflicts
| and war and existentially threatening neighbors are happier
| than people who have, by comparison, so much less to be unhappy
| about.
|
| Also the old are very rich in America. They hold stocks and do
| well. I'm a millennial and can't say I've had that experience.
| I would bet old Europeans own less securities and are less
| wealthy possibly. This decreases the older generations
| happiness possibly and may artificially raise youth happiness
| in comparison.
|
| It's all interesting and there's a lot here to look at and
| ponder over. I do think there's something unique about American
| youths and how they use these technologies though.
|
| I would also bet there's less commerce masked as social media
| platforms Europe. Many young Americans sort of blend the use of
| these apps with attempts to make money. That's my perception at
| least. That may introduce stressors not seen in a society which
| doesn't have such a focus on being industrious or busy
| constantly.
| jjav wrote:
| > Also the old are very rich in America. They hold stocks and
| do well.
|
| That is quite a generalization. The rich old people are
| indeed very rich.
|
| Also, a lot of old people are quite poor and poverty is
| increasing in that age bracket.
|
| https://www.ncoa.org/article/latest-census-bureau-data-
| shows...
| coryrc wrote:
| We spend far, far more on a single invalid dementia patient
| in a nursing home than on a poor family with young kids.
|
| And not nearly enough on preventing young single people
| from becoming poor single mothers.
| sameoldtune wrote:
| Came here to write similar things. The US has had absolutely
| unrivaled prosperity in the last 70 years. I think some
| healthy global arbitration is occurring. Globalization,
| remote work, and raising standards of living mean there are
| fewer faceless foreign workers to grind to dust--some of that
| pain inevitably will come back home now in the form of lower
| real wages and less glamorous work.
|
| Young people still have good wages and opportunities, but it
| is hard not to be envious of previous (white) generations
| that could expect a separated house and a pension for working
| at a factory. It would be nice if young people could have a
| broader perspective on this point, but that's a complaint as
| old as civilization.
| AzzyHN wrote:
| Social media certainly doesn't help, but once again, the powers
| that be find everything to blame except for themselves for
| creating the conditions of misery necessary for "infinite"
| growth
| bananapub wrote:
| I do love the US Right's hilariously dishonest obsession with
| "free speech" and how the rest of the US engages with them as if
| it is some good faith disagreement.
|
| the Right should also be more worried - requiring the
| construction of this sort of Technological Autocracy
| Infrastructure should scare them, since presumably they won't
| always be in charge. of course the flip side is that a lot of the
| leaders are Christian Dominionists who aren't worried about that,
| since they want to end the United States as it currently exists.
|
| anyway, cheery! hope everyone agrees that not letting kids see
| what Rhianna had for lunch or whatever was worth it.
| bananapub wrote:
| worth remembering what this sort of stupidity actually means:
| creating the infrastructure for US government(s) mandated and
| approved identity verification on the Internet. this has a number
| of serious consequences, unrelated to children learning awesome
| dance moves:
|
| - it's obviously a massive violation of whatever remains of "free
| speech" in the US, and allowing this to happen creates a
| precedent for nibbling at all sorts of other things - creates
| precedent that children are even more subservient to their
| parents and random whims of whatever politicians are in charge at
| any point
|
| - it creates the technical infrastructure and precedent for
| random US governments and whatever lunatics control them at the
| time to mediate permission to access websites
|
| - it creates a massive database of PII, this time focussed on
| kids, which will be accessed endlessly by random companies, and
| will de facto have no actual access controls
|
| - it spews government-required and validated PII around loads of
| random websites - hacking a site and then quietly passively
| copying all their calls to the database will be of great interest
| to fuckwits around the world
|
| - will require trying harder to geo-locate users, creating even
| more PII and having even more of it being government-audited
|
| - creates a huge hammer for politicians to beat up on unfavoured
| companies / blackmail them
|
| - undermines the functioning of the US as a coherent unified
| state
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Limiting it for people over 70 would probably do more good
| kgwxd wrote:
| The year of the Lemmy off-shore instances!
| exabrial wrote:
| I'll be the odd guy out and say it should probably be illegal to
| attempt to enter a contract (AUP, privacy policy, etc) with a
| minor anyway (for a lot of reasons around exploitation), so I
| don't _really_ have a major issue with this at face value.
|
| I know the devil is in the details though, so kinda curious what
| the actual provisions are.
|
| The alternative is a free internet, where we don't need accounts
| to do things, because we're not building or storing advertising
| profiles on users. Hmmmm... imagine that.
| tremon wrote:
| Plenty of other goods and services are used by children, even
| targeted at them, without them needing to enter a contract.
| alectroem wrote:
| I think the OP was saying that having minors agree to a
| social media sites terms and conditions is them entering a
| contract. So if you're against minors entering contracts, its
| logically consistent to also be against holding minors to a
| websites terms.
| spicykraken wrote:
| Children aren't allowed to play slot machines either and
| that's what TikTok (and Youtube Shorts, etc) sure feels like
| to me.
| wvenable wrote:
| It might feel that way but what's the real difference
| between TikTok and watching TV? Society has always
| restricted children's access to specific content but now
| we're restricting children's access to specific _mediums_
| regardless of the content itself.
|
| Why is TikTok or YouTube shorts not a valid way to consume
| media?
|
| It's a bit like arguing graphic novels are acceptable to
| children but short comics are not.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The difference is _massive_.
|
| Your weird neighbour who has a feet fetish would never
| get to be a TV star, but he can amass 50k followers on
| TikTok, and request feet pics via private messages to
| them.
|
| Now multiply that by ten thousand.
| ksherlock wrote:
| Generally speaking, in the US, contracts with minor (< 18) are
| voidable, that is, at any time the minor can break the
| contract. This creates a situation where no one would ever
| contract with a minor, which is obviously bad (how is an
| emancipated minor supposed to rent an apartment?) so there are
| statutory exceptions where the contract will be enforced.
| adventured wrote:
| The minor gets a co-signer for the apartment.
|
| Why would anybody rent to a minor otherwise, regardless of
| the contract breaking issues. They are unlikely to have much
| credit history. To say nothing of the maturity /
| responsibility and income (+ wealth / cash savings) problems.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| Well, I'll throw one my customer's ideas out there. "Only
| validate their age _if_ they 're under 16."
|
| Originally, "Only require a middle name when they have one."
| ijijijjij wrote:
| What's the definition of social media in this case?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Yeah the definition of "social media" has got to be so loose
| that it will be a slippery slope law used to enforce ID
| requirements on all sorts of online applications, from games to
| instant messengers.
| tech_ken wrote:
| To me this has the flavor of adding ratings for a video game or
| movie, or having porn sites ask if you're over 18 before letting
| you in. I guess possibly it will do some good (assuming that the
| implementation isn't crap, which is a stretch), but overall seems
| like a probable nothingburger in terms of actually being good for
| young adults' mental well-being. Evidence for the negative
| impacts of social media on young adults is thin AFAIK, so
| ultimately seems more like an attempt to cash in on the social-
| media/trans rights moral panic that DeSantis has built his
| political brand around.
|
| I do wonder why the bill seeks to restrict users' freedoms,
| rather than making it illegal to advertise to children in general
| or something (as many other countries besides the US did decades
| ago to target children's television). I don't want to impute too
| much into DeSantis' motivations without evidence, but from where
| I'm standing it certainly seems like the difference is the model
| of harm. If your model is: "advertising to children is
| profitable, so social media will do shady things to keep them
| engaged to shill them crap" then banning ads makes sense, whereas
| if it's: "children go on social media/the internet[0], meet new
| people, and learn that they may be gender non-conforming in some
| way" then dramatically curtailing their access to the internet
| seems more effective.
|
| [0] Given the dominance of social media platforms these terms
| seems basically interchangeable in this context, IMO.
| LVB wrote:
| Let the experiment take place, I say. Just like Oregon's now-
| repealed drug use decriminalization bill. It didn't achieve its
| intended goals, but there is now a mass of data about what
| assumptions were wrong, implementation issues, etc. IMO there is
| real value in letting states put such changes into play to get
| beyond the debate and actually test the hypotheses.
| rhelz wrote:
| > IMO there is real value in letting states ... test the
| hypotheses.
|
| "Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will have no other" --
| Benjamin Franklin
| antegamisou wrote:
| Policy-making isn't supposed be, at least shouldn't be, some
| lab experiment. The _hey at least we tried_ isn 't the best
| reasoning for the lack of insight of those in charge.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Justice Brandeis, who coined the term "laboratories of
| democracy", felt otherwise:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy
| antegamisou wrote:
| Ah yes, I almost forgot we're talking about the US where it
| was OK for the state to secretly conduct mind control human
| experimentation for over 20 years.
| handoflixue wrote:
| Could you explain a bit more about how Brandeis'
| philosophy relates to that case? Was he actively arguing
| for this sort of experiment, or are you just trying to
| imply that "experimentation"/science means you lack any
| morals?
| caditinpiscinam wrote:
| I wonder what the people who were forcibly sterilized after
| Buck v Bell thought of Brandeis' philosophy.
| handoflixue wrote:
| Could you explain a bit more about how Brandeis'
| philosophy relates to that case? Was he pro-
| sterilization, or are you just trying to imply that
| "experimentation"/science means you lack any morals?
| paulddraper wrote:
| And yet it is.
| handoflixue wrote:
| How else are we going to find out which policies work, if we
| can't perform experiments? The experiment is the basic tool
| of science.
| jliptzin wrote:
| You're assuming the politicians enacting this law care about
| such data much less learn anything from it.
| EnigmaFlare wrote:
| No he's not because the experiment doesn't depend on them.
| Social science researchers use these kinds of sudden
| differences in laws all the time to study their effects.
| People in general can look at the outcomes too if they're
| obvious enough.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| reference:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/01/oregon-drug...
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Let the experiment take place, I say
|
| It is an unconstitutional law; it is following the path of
| similar unconstitutional laws123. Where is the experiment?
|
| 1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan..
| .
|
| 2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reno_v._American_Civil_Liberti..
| . (sections about minor access to indecent material struck
| down)
|
| 3https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-
| courts/ohio/oh...
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > Let the experiment take place, I say.
|
| I think the experiment is more about the judiciary and about
| tribal politics. There's ample case law against something like
| this, so to me this seems unconstitutional, and I doubt it will
| stand. But DeSantis will win some more heart and minds of the
| folks who secretly do want big government protecting them from
| the boogieman.
|
| Regardless of anyone's views about social media, the fact that
| the government wants 'papers please' for you to access a
| website should really scare everyone.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| Laws are often just social signals in writing. A law
| indicates that a large group agrees that something is bad.
| Often times people find it easier to just agree with a law
| rather than navigate the mental gray area around behaviors
| that aren't black and white.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| Is that the case here? What is that large group and what is
| it comprised of? Does it represent all Floridians?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Would HN be "social media" under this law?
| zkid18 wrote:
| Can anyone not from the US explain how we can work with the data
| from social media? These are the questions we need to address:
|
| 1. How can we identify if the user is based in Florida? 2. How
| can we determine their age? 3. How can we map the parent-child
| relationship here? 4. What will happen if the account was created
| in Argentina during traveling?
| newobj wrote:
| tHe PaRtY of LImIteD goVerNmEnT
| soygem wrote:
| >kids getting brain less damaged by shorts and tiktoks
|
| We are so back
|
| >id required for more stuff
|
| It's so over
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