Next, they should limit boomer social media access.
And then everyone in between.
"...Meta said it has robust tools to keep children safe."
Sure.
--
Watching the socials get lumped into the same moral category as cigarettes, domestic abuse, the Sacklers, and cable news, is giving me a bit of schadenfreude.
I feel like it is a universally constant thing for some subset of people to want their government to “force those other people to do what I think they should be doing”.
The only the US does relatively well is to provide mechanisms to reverse course when these things happen. Which is also why a lot of changes end up in gridlock.
When I was a teenager my screen time was the maximum feasible. Now my average screentime is between 12 and 14 hours a day. I'm yet another gainfully employed software engineer.
I don't think there is any empirical evidence correlating tech addiction to income, but if there was I wouldn't be surprised if the relationship was positive.
For me this is a public health measure. If video games were shown to have a similarly destructive effect on our youth I'd consider regulating that too.
They will not be the last. There is a lot of political capital being spent in this area, both because it improves health outcomes for young people, and because whatever negative side effects might arise will largely be borne by California and the larger tech industry alone. Big Tech is not seen as an ally in many state capitals.
Related, but my prediction is that by the end of the decade internet anonymity will be gone forever. Social will be the first place it falls with governments requiring SSO to a government run IdP that is verified by ID
End of anonymity and end of large scale unfiltered user-generated content. The internet is going to become like every other form of information media where a tiny group of people/companies is publishing and the rest of us are consuming, no questions asked.
It's not impossible, but that's a lot of tech for the fed to setup and they aren't the best at consumer level software. There's also the fact that many political players utilize the anonymity of the internet in their campaign tactics. Not to mention the possibility of connecting to a VPN to circumvent the requirement for using a US ID.
I think it's more likely to see intelligence agencies insist on more direct control over stopping "viral" spread of "disinformation", and to at least threaten to hold platforms responsible.
And is that bad or something? If you want to use a harmful product (and make no mistake social apps are harmful), then being careful about who is using it is a good idea.
And all of the security is in the physical card manufacturing itself. Uploading a photo of a card is trivial to photoshop and requires no hardware at all.
It's not hard to design age verification to avoid that. Briefly you have age verification done by sites that already have to have your identity or that you trust giving your ID to, and then provide a protocol that lets you use the verification from them with other sites.
With a little modern cryptography you can make this protocol so that the age verifier gets no information about what sites you are using the age verification with, and the other sites gets nothing that ties the identity used with the age verifier site to the identity you are at the other site.
Whether this is a reasonable law or not, my big problem with it is that it puts the burden of enforcement on tech platforms rather than the kids' parents. There is no way for any company to check for something like this without also affecting every other user of the site, whether they are in Utah or not and whether they are a teen or not. What do they do exactly, start collecting government IDs from us before every visit?
Honestly this seems like the best idea. You can’t get accused of letting a kid access outside approved hours if you don’t allow people in Utah on.
What about adults? They may be lying kids. So either no access (safer) or strict age checks involving checking licenses and stuff. But that’s expensive. No Utah is easier.
How do you know they’re in Utah? IP addresses. Blocks people outside Utah? Sorry, our lawyers made us do this. Complain to your reps that Utah is messing with your state’s citizens. VPNs? Maybe gotta block that too.
Utah is not a big state. The social networks could easily use this to try to “teach a lesson”. Just say you’ll let Utahans back in when their government makes a foolproof age verification system.
And wait.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the intent of the law, it just seems unenforceable/unimplementable, as usual. No benefit to the social networks but huge legal downsides.
Lmao imagine Utah becoming the most mentally healthy region on earth, suicide rates plummeting, productivity up 300%, people spending time with parents and grandparents again? record sign ups in sports clubs, record birth rates etc.
If the state has total control over every aspect of their citizens' lives they can model the population into any perfect utopia they desire. I'd still not like to live in that world.
Isn't this the opposite though? They're not telling people how to live their lives. They're taking away the power Facebook has over many people's lives so people might enjoy their lives in more social and healthy ways again.
"any legislation restricting behavior actually frees people to do what they always wanted (the government knows best what that is) but just couldn't because of all these other possibilities misguiding them"
"there should be no laws against tobacco, alcohol, drug abuse, gambling because people can't possibly be misguided by powerful corporate interests for profit or otherwise"
That's not what I said. There is a balance to be found. I only objected to "this restriction actually makes everyone free (to do what I think they should)" being used as an argument. If enough people agree, sure, you can ban social media. The reasoning should be a cost benefit analysis though, not "my laws shall make you free".
They’re also taking away the support some marginalized people may get from social networks (eg LGBT, uncommon religions for the area) that their local community doesn’t provide/discriminates against/their parents hate.
Social networks, for all their faults, are not pure evil. They can be beneficial for some people.
Do you think one would have to be on a network with at least 5 million users to get this sort of support as opposed to a smaller one, perhaps specifically oriented towards this sort of stuff? The latter is as legal as before I think.
I said "perhaps". Just join a social network with less than 5m users without "gay" in its name then. This attitude of trying to help a monopoly and pretend it's good just baffles me.
Not offline, just not using social networks. Same way kids can drink juice, water and pop but not alcohol. Should kids be allowed to drink alcohol or smoke? Again, if I see this as a public health measure I think it makes sense.
Are you referring to China or USSR by chance? Hardly utopias.
It's not about every aspect of life but a few key norms. I see this predatory social media like gambling if not worse, and gambling is regulated in most places
I’m sure you’re writing all of this in a “yeah, that’ll teach em” voice, but this all sounds amazing. Please, let social media block everyone, become irrelevant, then bring back the old internet.
I expect if it were to happen there would be a very large outcry (in Utah at a minimum) and the law would be changed/repealed quickly.
It would be a VERY interesting natural experiment if it stayed in effect. People would find ways back on, but not everyone would be willing to go through the hoops. What would that do in even a month or two?
I suspect it would improve things drastically in Utah. That’s what I’d bet on, anyway. I’m a libertarianish person, so I don’t love this legislation, but… I’m not gonna lie. It half makes me want to move to Utah.
While you may not like the current method of communication and congregation, you must understand _why_ we have the first amendment, right? Congregating together and discussing ideas of (nearly) any sort is an absolutely vital part of democracy and a free society
They're excited about the idea of those sites blocking users in general. It's not really a first amendment thing. That comment isn't focused on the broader context.
I’m sure someone else will cook up a new way to talk to people online after we’ve all decided the current one needs to go; nature hates a vacuum. The current manifestation is not helping anyone though.
It's not surprising at all for Utah. That is a highly Mormon run state that has strong stances on how you should live your life. Even if you are a "goi" (I use the word loosely to illustrate the cultural metaphor in a us v them mentality) to them.
What is amazing is that they have this strong stance on how to restrictively govern the people inside their borders, but yet expect to have a western lifestyle support them. More organizations should stand up and say "I'll pass" in a blanket ban on them.
> That is a highly Mormon run state that has strong stances on how you should live your life. Even if you are a "goi" (I use the word loosely to illustrate the cultural metaphor in a us v them mentality) to them.
I think you're crossing a line here. You are accusing the Mormons in Utah of having a us-versus-them mentality. But your own comment tries to turn readers against Mormons.
Never forget: The Missouri Executive Order 44, also known as the Mormon Extermination Order, was issued on October 27, 1838, by Governor Lilburn Boggs. The order authorized the expulsion of Mormons from the state and is sometimes referred to as the "Mormon Kill Law". However, the order was rescinded by Governor Christopher S. "Kit" Bond in 1976.
I think we should all be more charitable to Mormons after what they've been through.
That was 185 years ago, how charitable have Utah mormons been this year to the LGBT community? The unspoken intentions of this bill given the state's recent legislative priorities are absolutely horrifying and far more deserving of criticism and deep skepticism than charity.
I live in Utah. If that's what happens, that would be awesome! "Sorry kids, no fb/tiktok/insta and there's nothing I can do about it. None of them work where we live"
Would be a huge win for all parents. No social media, and we don't have to be the bad guys taking it away.
Another Utahn here and I feel the same. I don’t really see how this could work and think it will probably go away quietly, but I’d kind of love it if these platforms (and the social pressure our kids feel to be on them) just went away.
Hopefully this is hyperbole. Seems a bit extreme to hope the government legislates away industries because you don't want to handle the parenting yourself.
I would love it if you would state what you think the viewpoint opposite yours is and then try to defend it, then explain why that defense is wrong.
> legislates away industries because you don't want to handle the parenting yourself.
What are your thoughts on pharmaceutical/heroin legislation? What are your thoughts on making it illegal to advertise unhealthy food to kids? How do you feel about the idea of product placement in children's TV shows? How do you feel about letting pharmaceutical companies directly market to children?
You look at parenting as black and white. Good parents would prevent their kids from doing bad things. Bad parents can't prevent their kids from doing bad things. "If a kid does something bad then it is because they have bad parents."
The reality is that parents are just one element of the childs environment and that their choice to do bad things can be fit to a bell curve based on the complete set of environmental factors for which parenting is one element.
Holding parenting ability constant, the government could make changes that would improve outcomes for some set of children.
> I would love it if you would state what you think the viewpoint opposite yours is and then try to defend it, then explain why that defense is wrong.
Sorry, I don't know what this means.
> What are your thoughts on pharmaceutical/heroin legislation? What are your thoughts on making it illegal to advertise unhealthy food to kids? How do you feel about the idea of product placement in children's TV shows? How do you feel about letting pharmaceutical companies directly market to children?
The comment this chain is replying to was about tech companies not offering their services at all in Utah. I'd think, for the most part, I'd be against most regulations that basically say "to protect the children, we will ban X for everyone". I'm sure there are exceptions though.
> ...rest of the comment
I agree, the government can act to improve the outcomes for children and I didn't state anything to the contrary. Rather, I believe that gleefully accepting or cheering on a ban of all technology, for both adults and children, that the government might believe causes harm to children is quite unfortunate.
You called something hyperbole. You said you had a hard time imagining someone in good faith wishing that the government would legislate away an industry so that they don't have to "parent."
So I asked:
What do you think the person you are responding too's position is?
What do you think is the best defense for that position?
What do you think that position is wrong despite what you see as its best defense?
I think the tobacco industry is an obvious industry to make reference to. I think now days most people who don't smoke would be happy to see it regulated away and I think it would be an extremely fringe position to think the tobacco industry should be able to advertise to kids today.
> I'd be against most regulations that basically say "to protect the children, we will ban X for everyone". I'm sure there are exceptions though.
Just because we don't know the full extent of how bad Facebook is now, doesn't mean it isn't bad.
How bad do you think we thought smoking, opiates, or other problems were before we decided they were bad?
We saw the correlation with harm of tobacco, investigated more deeply, then regulated their wide spread use particularly use by children.
Facebook is modern day tobacco.
I am much less black and white about this than you might expect, because I am generally pro letting people do what they want with their bodies. After the age of 25 (when a person's prefrontal cortex is fully developed) there are few good arguments for preventing a net tax payer from doing what they want to their bodies or time. If someone can be told they are old enough to die (or kill) for their country, that's another factor that makes limiting their freedom to make bad decisions a hard argument.
> that the government might believe causes harm to children is quite unfortunate.
When you say "the government" that is entirely jaded. There is more nuance than us (the oppressed) and them (the government). Replace the government with "my fellow neighbors," and I think it harms the anti-government righteousness a bit.
The context of the original conversation was clearly not about banning Facebook, but about not being sad if they went away. Telling facebook it can't do business in utah if it serves children and Facebook deciding to not do any business in Utah as a result is not banning Facebook.
> What are your thoughts on pharmaceutical/heroin legislation?
The USA government already makes the incorrect decision regarding these substances by criminalizing them, banning them, and throwing users in prison. Evidence shows that legalizing these substances and providing addiction care and universal healthcare, as well as tackling homelessness with empathetic solutions (literally just give them housing, it's that simple), is the so far most effective method to reduce usage of these substances.
Thus the highly retributive, reactionary USA government, or its local manifestations, can't be trusted to make these kinds of laws well.
Great, it banned tik tok for the kids. It passed a morality law. You know, fox news isn't really news, and some have suggested to that it provides a direct path to radicalization that leads to political violence. We should probably ban that, too. Don't worry, if you want to watch it, you can unlock it by applying at the local Office of Moral Wellbeing, just provide a photocopy of your photo ID and proof of address for them to file. That way if Fox changes channel registration, they have a list of all the people that watch it, so they can send someone to let you know the channel number changed.
TikTok is a national security issue and a reciprocity issue and for that reason it was a bad choice of example.
You can look at other social media as a morality problem. I could see why someone would think of it that way, but we are literally quite governed by our neurotransmitters, and these companies literally have "engagement" (read: addiction) engineers. There are literally addiction engineers working on creating the state of addiction. Engineers working on figuring out how to get people to spend the maximum amount of time possible on the apps.
At some point it becomes a health issue. Stimulus is stimulus. Dopamine dysfunction is real.
What's the difference between scrolling an infinite feed for 10 hours and feeling good on an opium den couch for 10 hours? I am not saying that's a perfect comparison, but I don't think it's as simple as morality. These social media apps cause real biological response and there are engineers literally working on manipulating those responses.
I agree with you that social media is a social toxin. Kind of like alcohol or heroin.
The solution for all three I think is the same. Don't allow the government to pass laws criminalizing these things, because that has bad outcomes. It's a lot easier to say "the government isn't allowed to restrict bodily autonomy" than it is to for example try to write into law the 800 different specific exact scenarios where society thinks abortion is ok. In this case, "the government isn't allowed to pass laws restricting access to information" or something along those lines.
Certainly we should allow our government to offer alternatives, information on the negative effects of a toxin, treatments, and use our governments to ensure good social safety nets that prevent people falling into toxin abuse as their only escape.
I'm talking about the problems of using the State to enforce whatever given values or ideals. The State is at best completely imperfect, at worst, it's fascist and trying to kill you and people like you. Don't let it get to that point, don't let it ban what it today defines as "social media."
There are better ways to protect society from these harmful things. Mostly I think solutions around good public education.
I don't think criminalizing is the right approach. I think taxing them for usage that exceeds a reasonable amount of time might be a reasonable policy. I think it would be ok to 100% tax any advertising profit gained after 1 hour of use. I suppose that creates a conflict of interest because then the government directly benefits from over-use which is its own hazard. I think the most American approach would be to codify that Facebook (or other social media) is directly liable for medical treatment related to social media use creating a feedback mechanism that disincentivizes bad behavior.
I don't know what to do, but I do think social media is becoming a cancer, and I do think we need treatment. I don't now what the treatment is.
I think you're saying the treatment can be worse than the disease, and I agree.
> I'm talking about the problems of using the State to enforce whatever given values or ideals.
I think we probably agree on a lot politically, but this is where I think I take a hard turn.
Somewhere bad faith behavior must be discouraged. Education is one place that happens, the legal system is another place. Education is only a first line defense against bad faith.
In the game theory of daily life, defectors and defection cannot be a winning strategy otherwise society will turn from a high trust society into a low trust society. Consensus will be abandoned in favor of dominance. To be honest, I think we are already to that point.
Human rights are an example of an ideal that the state must enforce. Contractual obligations are an ideal a state must enforce. Rule of law is an ideal that a state must enforce. Property rights are an ideal states must enforce.
Where it becomes less clear is the Fox News case you stated because Fox News is actively trying to destroy the idea of rule of law.
I don't know how to deal with that.
Do you think that's a problem? Should nothing be done?
> I think you're saying the treatment can be worse than the disease, and I agree.
Basically yes.
> Where it becomes less clear is the Fox News case you stated because Fox News is actively trying to destroy the idea of rule of law.
I only use the Fox news example as a wake up call to conservatives cackling gleefully as the government of Ohio shutting down access to a social media platform.
Actually the core of my fear revolves around that: the American government at all levels, in any state, is highly reactionary, and I'm afraid of it using its newly discovered power to get away with this sort of thing to start banning communication among leftists. Or, something I think it will try in the next two years, banning communication among LGBT people.
Well, I guess this is where I wish communities had more power to organize their own protections and arrangements. Imagine if one town wanted to ban fox news for example, the USA government would probably step in and enforce a lawsuit against them. It seems the power dynamics are out of wack.
> I would love it if you would state what you think the viewpoint opposite yours is and then try to defend it, then explain why that defense is wrong.
Ok, this would be opposite: I want absolute access to my 17 years old kids account. I want read all their messages with their friends and I do not want them to have any privacy, because I want to fully control them.
Second part of the opposite: I dont want to talk with my kids about social dynamic in their peer group. I do not want to talk with them about beauty standards, realistic or not. I do not want to help them navigate peer relationships and I do not care about my kids thoughts. My idea of solving these issues is to cut their access to communication methods.
I am not about to defend either.
> What are your thoughts on pharmaceutical/heroin legislation?
I am actually fine with whole bunch of regulations and law. Really, this dichotomy where if you dont like one law you need to hate all of them is ridiculous. It
I hope that corporations more frequently put less relevant jurisdictions in their place and remind representatives that they are in competition with other jurisdictions and this overrides their public service ideas.
So I’m more of a fan of seeing that. Not the actual outcome.
Would make more people choose more collaborative solutions faster.
I'm always very unimpressed by this kind of argumentation. There's a clear difference in kind between Hackernews, Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok. Sure, they all feature user-submitted content, but to pretend that there is any meaningful similarity beyond that seems silly.
Is there? Is there to your 80 year old senator and their constituents that think the internet is a series of tubes. You know, the constituents that actually vote?
Does it matter how well you explain it anyway? Modern political language lacks definition by design. Do street interviews and ask Americans what socialism is. Then ask them what they'd call the government giving banks money. Then ask them how many times in the last 20 years the government has given banks money.
My argument is that we should just not let the governments pass these kinds of laws because it opens the door to using these laws to arbitrarily block whatever website they can vaguely hand wave as "social media" or whatever they pick.
I'm always very unimpressed by people who believe that politicians have the intellectual capacity to differentiate between HN and Reddit.
They don't, especially when they're throwing their weight around after screaming about internet boogeymen for years.
Go watch the Tiktok hearings. They were losing their minds because filters could track your eyes and your cell phone could use the internal wifi network in order to access the internet.
You can ban social media as a parent today and damage your child's social life.
If it's banned for every child equally, they will have to meet up irl or call each other like in the 80s or whatever. Whatever the alternative, it shifts the dynamic and doesn't isolate your child.
Regulations for kids is not simply about bad parenting but can be about prisoner's dilemma-like situations where everyone needs to work together for a good outcome and, unless a decent percentage gets on board at more or less the same time, it's counterproductive for individuals.
We should also enforce strict school dress codes so students don't have to see other students wearing new shoes and feel pressured to update their wardrobe right? Kids shouldn't be able to talk about family vacations because it might make other students jealous and hurt their mental health. We need to ban these books because it might make kids feel bad about themselves. Where do these ridiculous steps end?
From other comments, it seems the definition is not "what you assume is a social media app" but "any service with over 5 million users that facilitates chat via posts". I am 99% certain this includes Hacker News, Steam, probably also bugs.chromium.org and bugzilla.mozilla.org, and maybe even any website that allows user comments if they happen to have over 5 million users.
> From other comments, it seems the definition is not "what you assume is a social media app" but "any service with over 5 million users that facilitates chat via posts".
It's baffling to read all the HN comments encouraging draconian restrictions and forced PII collection on websites, all with the assumption that it will only apply to websites I don't like.
Laws like this, if enforced, would make a lot of the sites you use on a daily basis require strict ID verification. Are you really ready to be doing the ID verification dance with GitHub, Reddit, Hacker News and every other big site on the internet just to post?
Of course not. You're going to sign up for a VPN and use it, just like all of the 17 year old kids who just want to use the internet like normal people.
I welcome it. Breaking the way the internet is used these days would be a huge win for society as a whole no matter how painful it might look at first.
There are benefits to reducing anonymity: accountability, trust, relationships, etc. It's why humans evolved to recognize faces so well. We decide who to trust based on experience. It doesn't matter who controls the identification process, so long as its done fairly. And if corporations or government misuse identification for self-serving purposes, we should certainly push back.
- Chilling effect on political discussions. Good luck campaigning to overturn these laws if you can't do so without fear of reprisal from government officials or your local community.
- Limiting the ability for marginalized groups to seek support; LGBTQ youth, ex-mormons, etc., would be directly harmed by this.
It doesn't necessarily have to be these laws, it could be anything, but to answer your question - they might paint me as somehow being "against the children", having bought in to the angle that these laws make children safer.
Just curious is the any different from what happens right now, when someone campaigns against something you disagree with? If someone online, pseudo-anonymously posts something that is perceived to be against trans rights or pro-life, there is already a mob of people working to de-anonymize and punish them for their wrong-think. How is it any different or better to have the current system?
> Just curious is the any different from what happens right now
Because right now you can be anonymous/pseudonymous? Of course people will try to unmask you, but I'm contrasting it in a world where you can't even attempt it.
Political discussions should be open and transparent. If there is reprisal for well-intentioned statements, proportional action should be taken to stop the reprisal.
Though it is nice to allow various beliefs, it is more important to have a cohesive community, even if it means sacrificing some personal beliefs. Personal values should line up with community values. If they are in contradiction, an open discussion should be had to realign them.
I don’t think that’s where this goes. I think this leads to less internet use in general. Just like when Apple broke Facebook’s mobile tracking the ad dollars dried up and forced Facebook to scramble to find a new tracking mechanism which most agree is subpar and thus that revenue hasn’t returned. I’m hopeful that people spend less time in anonymized spaces that aren’t conducive to healthy discussion and relationships and instead seek out each other in real life.
The sponsors of this bill are likely less worried about the 17yr olds who can hack around the restrictions. They're more worried about 12 and 13yr olds who are attempting suicide and experiencing mental health crises at a rate that far exceeds any previous time.
The problem is the loss of privacy for all users. They will be forced to verify the identity of every user to do business in Utah, so you can either expect third parties like Stripe (with their Identity product) to get richer or an increase in leaks and hacks containing tons of driver's licenses.
You realize these companies will quiet-fire all employees residing in Utah and never hire there again? That this will place massive negative pressure on all software salaries in Utah? Possibly on all software salaries outside of deep blue states?
It’s a narrow win. If people can’t post to their sites, they’re going to start thinking about going to Colorado rather than Utah for their skiing. The so-called “Silicon slopes” are going to thin out as large companies question what the legislature is going to arbitrarily decide to screw with next. Tourism dollars and high tech jobs are a hefty price.
As an aside, I lived in Utah for many years and I generally thought people preferred to not have the government dictating what was allowed and not allowed.
Willing to bet most of the Utahns you lived around are more worried about the impact of these services on their kids than on government overreach. They can't figure out a non-governmental way to fix the issue.
Also, no Reddit, no Discord, no forums and no Hacker News.
Paradoxically, TikTok and Instagram could pass in a limited form. What is targeted is communication between people, mindless consumption is fine by that law.
> Utah has become the first US state to require social media firms get parental consent for children to use their apps and verify users are at least 18.
> The bills also impose a social media curfew that blocks children's access between 22:30 and 06:30, unless adjusted by their parents.
So there would very much be something you could do about it, and your kids would find out.
You're still the quote-unquote bad guys. You still have to, gasp, parent.
The solution is actually simpler than that. Just shut down any company operations in Utah, refuse to accept any payments from users with Utah addresses and require all of your employees that are located in Utah to relocate. But people in Utah can continue using the service.
It's also quite possible that this law gets thrown out as unconstitutional by the federal courts since it seems similar to the California video game censorship law from Brown v. EMA.
I would say that anonymity on social media currently has a serious, real-world price to pay. Teen girls and Instagram don’t mix - the numbers reporting depression and suicidal thoughts since it took off is heartbreaking.
They made us wear masks due to a threat to our physical health. Social media is currently having extremely acute effects on the mental health of a generation. It may have reached the point that losing anonymity and requiring ID is better than suicides and depression. At this point, if you look at the numbers, it’s like claiming the government is infringing your rights to buy alcohol anonymously. We should stop pretending that mental health damage is of lower priority than physical health.
(And don’t get me started about the parents - outside of SV, only a few percent even know parental controls exist, let alone how to use them effectively without loopholes.)
Is anonymity the key issue for your example of Instagram and teen girls? I'd guess that a lot of the pressures come from their peers and professional users who are quite openly using their own identity.
I would suggest that those cases are a minor issue and the major negative pressure comes from general interaction with peers (whose names they know) or comparing themselves and their lives to professional social media users (almost always openly using their name).
> I would say that anonymity on social media currently has a serious, real-world price to pay. Teen girls and Instagram don’t mix - the numbers reporting depression and suicidal thoughts since it took off is heartbreaking.
I wouldn't say that anonymity is the problem here, but rather that social media sites are crafted to abuse the psychology of their users for attention, engagement, ad impressions etc.
It isn't a given that social media has to make teens depressed. If the psychologists and researchers that are hired by these companies to hone in on engagement were instead were paid to make their platforms less psychologically harmful, we could see better results. Hell, platforms have the potential to improve people's lives if they were optimized for those outcomes. Civil and criminal liability could be introduced to social media operators to ensure that their products aren't causing harm, as well.
Incentives to achieve those results can come from legislation and the judicial system.
In my reply the poster, I did directly point out that we're using a mostly anonymous platform to discuss this issue. However, I agree with you.. it's about how the platform encourages or ignores bad outcomes.
> Teen girls and Instagram don’t mix - the numbers reporting depression and suicidal thoughts since it took off is heartbreaking.
This has been a claim for a long time. Esp with self esteem and teen mags or the beauty industry. Unfortunately, social media is the greatest prison people created for themself.
> losing anonymity and requiring ID is better than suicides and depression
Mr gjsman-1000, is this a reasonable claim? SM that advocates free discussion in a mostly anonymous forum [HN].. is that causing the issue that we're discussing? [My stance is engagement oriented industries are causing this at the benefit of profit]
> outside of SV, only a few percent even know parental controls exist, let alone how to use them effectively without loopholes.
This sounds like a great acknowledgement of a problem that can be fixed.
> Teen girls and Instagram don’t mix - the numbers reporting depression and suicidal thoughts since it took off is heartbreaking.
Funny how people care about youth suicide only when it is about making controlling laws they want.
Somehow, there is zero interest in teen girls as persons - all I see on HN is tons of contempt towards them, again and again. Somehow, boys suicides dont matter at all despite being higher. Somehow, boys mental health issues matter only when you can use it as talking point against feminists (boys are depressed? must be because girls are allowed to refuse the sex).
Those have been solved by requiring ID. Personally, I find online storage of my ID to be a lot less acceptable than a bored teenager giving it a 2 second glance while I'm picking up beer.
Why not require an ID to own a smart phone? Seems far more realistic to set up regulation around smart phone ownership than to require businesses outside of your state to check IDs.
> it puts the burden of enforcement on tech platforms rather than the kids' parents
What else do you expect? When tech companies make phones secure enough for the NSA, every app has passwords, and most apps have disappearing messages, how exactly do you expect parents to monitor what their kids are doing?
All the "parental monitoring" apps do is check how much time kids are using the phone. They give zero info on what the kids are actually doing.
So tell me, you want to put the onus on the parents? OK, then require any app used by kids to make all messages available to parents, and forbid disappearing messages.
You don't want to do that? Well, then don't say: "parents you watch them".
You can't simultaneously make something someone else's responsibility, and also make it impossible for them to do it.
I’m not really sure if I disagree with you, but in the past we’re parents really able to see everything their children were doing? Like telephones did not record conversations, they were effectively “disappearing messages”.
I guess the argument would be technology enables children to do secret stuff without any of the obvious signs, like sneaking out in the middle of the night?
Telephones did not record, but they did have a log of incoming and outgoing numbers. So it was possible to check if a child was suddenly talking to someone new.
> I guess the argument would be technology enables children to do secret stuff without any of the obvious signs, like sneaking out in the middle of the night?
Yes, it was rather obvious when a teen was behaving secretive, or there were middle of the night calls.
Privacy is important, but if your teen was suddenly displaying secretive behavior you could tell.
Of course they were not able to see everything kids do. They were not able to track kids movements via app either. Parents have huge amount of control that was impossible in the past now.
They also lost some control, if you lived in ideologically segregated community, kids had no way to learn about ideas from outside. That was destroyed by internet. Your Utah Mormon kid can read pre LBGT materials now.
This, I think it would far more realistic to ban the type of devices a child can purchase or own then push this burden to "social media companies" on the internet.
We got our six year old daughter an Apple Watch with cell service. I think that’s allowed her a lot of freedom since she can walk to her friends house without crazy people calling CPS on us (totally happened before). She just met another girl with the same watch and now they are best friends.
That is precisely the solution. Tech platforms are far more culpable than parents in this matter. If that means your startup idea no longer scales - good riddance.
> If that means your startup idea no longer scales - good riddance.
And if that means no startup can possibly compete against the existing players in the industry that have the bandwidth and resources to implement the regulation?
After reading this thread I realized that's exactly what people (in this thread) want.
They want "the old internet" back, whatever it means. Of course it means no more startup. Startups change things and we don't want that! We want the exact internet from 1998.
I don't know why they want the "old internet" in a thread talking about protecting children lol.
When I was 13 I was playing CS 1.6 on dedicated servers with a small number of strangers that were like 30, I was also on I don't even know how many random forums with small numbers of users.
It's like a 13 year old hanging out at some random adult's house vs walking around a mall.
I can't see how a bill limiting access to websites with more than 5M users is going to reduce paedophilia.
> And if that means no startup can possibly compete against the existing players in the industry that have the bandwidth and resources to implement the regulation?
I think starting a tech startup under a VC model is a high-risk, high-reward setup and that your idea should be strong enough to withstand regulations such as this, yeah. There has been a lot of false innovation lately and it has soured my view on the model.
I think it also hurts the incumbents, even though they get a moat of sorts. But only a moat around "tracking teenagers for advertising data".
Just use BankID/GovID/whatever verified OAuth service and request a single age/date of birth data point once. No need to authenticate or store anything.
Utah's political system, and by virtue, judiciary, is run by LDS. Don't consider anything rational will necessarily prevail when powered by magical thinking.
I assume by default the true motive behind this is surveilling and outing gay and lgbt youth, thought-policing and suppressing progressive political speech and activism. I don't trust the motives of any red state in this regard.
You’re downvoted; but this is the obvious result. Mormons in the state don’t want their kids learning about sex or have good sex or find out all the contradictions in their holy book and they don’t want to find out that what their parents are doing is serious and scary manipulation and abuse and so banning their access to the internet is a way to protect the families and “protect” the children.
I think you and the parent comment are off base. I have no concrete evidence of that, but in a very blue Massachusetts, most parents I know begrudgingly allow their children on social media, and only to the extent required to prevent their children from being social outcasts. Social media has very real negative consequences for a lot of kids (and adults). I don’t think this is a red team/blue team game.
I agree. The stated reason is easily enough to explain the action. Tons of parents are concerned about this everywhere and would probably love such restrictions (if enacted by the networks instead of the state).
I'm no longer a practicing Mormon, and I understand where you're coming from, but that's not what's happening here. They'd be banning wider swaths of the internet if they were trying to keep kids from learning about sex or church history. This is a more generalized "protect the children from the world" instinct.
I would rather argue it is again easier to treat the symptoms rather than address underlying issues - regulate the toxic platforms. Similarly like smoking, the please don't smoke signs and over counter sales have not really helped until advertisement was largely prohibited/limited.
That was the first thing I thought of, personally. The internet is how I came to learn what transgender identity was in the thick of the Bush era, when you could not talk about these things with anyone in person. In many parts of the country, that hasn't changed since then, or it's even gotten worse. The internet helped me put into context a lot of things I simply couldn't talk about with mom and dad, or even god forbid, let them find out it was something I even wanted to talk about.
This wasn't mentioned in the debate over the bill (only it being marketed as some "common sense" bipartisan initiative), but I strongly suspect it benefited from the culture war over queer kids, and they will be disproportionately harmed by this.
One thing worth mentioning is that it only affects platforms with >5M users, and many of the resources I used back then were garage-run websites with much fewer users. I'm kind of mixed on this because I do believe major platforms are better equipped to handle abuse reports than rinky-dink forums. But on the flip side, said rinky-dink forums weren't constantly manipulating you for attention.
Teenagers need access to social activity and information outside of their parent's view to form their own identity and ideas. This is very healthy and natural. I understand social media is having a negative impact on teenage mental health, but so is having your parents listen in on every conversation.
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
This has, "If you write in your FB status that FB doesn't have permission to use your pictures as outlined in their ToS (which you already accepted) then they have to comply with your request," vibes.
Gonna be honest, it’s kind of cringey. I don’t think the sentiment is disagreed with here, but the fact that it sounds like an overzealous dungeon master.
This would ring a lot more true if we weren't talking about centralized websites that will enjoy the excuse to demand your government identity, adding to the surveillance databases that power their real business. And until tech culture moves on past this evolutionary dead end, governments will continue to think that the "Internet" is just another thing to be micro-regulated.
This is a strange way to legislate behavior. The fact that they're selectively cutting access to a population during a time period rather than limiting the overall negative reprocutions is a weird thing.
This is not the internet I want to participate in. It's freaking scary that the government is associating your ability to freely access information based on your class and standing. Why we have weak journalists and activists who aren't making a shitfit over it is just mind-boggling.
Subcomment: I do believe that social media has caused harm, however the negative reprocutions on how they're going about it does not seem like a good intention.
We as a society have decided you need an ID for alcohol, and ID for marijuana in the states where it is legal, and so forth. We know that social media can be just as habit-forming, addictive, and dangerous to mental health; especially among teenagers.
I see no reason why society should not extend ID requirements to certain times of night.
An important difference being the ID’s purpose being just to prove your age during for that transaction, not provide a mechanism to create a permanent record of your behavior.
Well, what is your plan? We can’t pretend that letting teen suicide jump 29%, and having 1 in 5 teens now having severe depression, is an issue that parents should be solely responsible for solving. And we shouldn’t pretend yet another social program could be as effective as slowing down the source.
That would be for Utah to solve. At a minimum, Utah should be providing the infrastructure for its people to be able to obtain a digital ID that has an API for websites to use which legally cannot have its history recorded.
I have strong support for the provisions that require certain features be built into social media sites themselves (e.g. "sites must support curfew scheduling" or "sites cannot have free reign on targeted advertisements") as it gives controls people want but currently can't easily get from most of these types of apps.
At the same time I'm not really a fan of the implementation being based on providing real identity for a hard age cutoff. Maybe I'm 20 years old and don't want my real identity to be tied to the social identity for privacy/coming out/political/other reasons as personal info uploaded seems to always get leaked. Maybe I'm 17 years old and having the same restrictions as a 7 year old that will disappear instantly in 3 months doesn't make any sense and I never had good chances to learn to make good choices on my own accord while I had the strongest support structures I'll have all my life available. Maybe I'm worried this is part of a slippery slope for all, as the ages keep rising on this type of legislation over time.
Overall I'd much rather put the tools (like curfew support or removal of targeted advertisements) in the hands of people and argue why they should want to use them. Similarly, with the tools made available, I'd rather trust parents are able to learn to raise their kid on this matter as they have every other matter so if kids are found to be working around curfews set by parents we don't need the government to step in. If one argues too many parents can't then I'm sorry to say you've done a horrible job convincing anyone what you think is good is actually so and relying on unpopular law creates more problems than it solves.
Alternatively I'd at least like a solution where the associated age verification identification is unrelated to your real identity (e.g. a one time proof at the DMV when you're getting your first 18+ license that gives you some identity token which identifies you as 18+ but does nothing else and is not stored or mapped with your real identity otherwise). It doesn't solve a lot of the blind application problems (and still lacks guarantee limitations you want to follow you into adulthood, if you so choose, can) but at least it prevents one class of issues.
It may sound like I fit in the small government camp for everything but I'd say I'm fine with government getting involved with what corporations can do a lot more often than when people are involved. Overall it also depends on the issue and the alternative outcomes with implementation. I guess what I'm saying is don't generalize because I argue for small government here I also argue for it in every case all the time, even if it is about people. There are some things I think it's great to centrally legislate but content consumption is one I don't think the benefits outweigh the costs on. It's certainly the most direct and probably has the largest impact but "we've waited so long to do anything about it that the problem to become really big" is a horrible reason to pick direct and largest impact approaches.
This was a long read, but I'm glad you wrote it out.
I too am in full support of zero trust tokens. However, I feel like society doesn't understand and would never support this. Corporations have no punishment for collecting and abusing people's information, that it's disgusting. Even when they're caught abusing it, theres no negative repercussions for the organizations. (Experian.. which should have been completely closed.. got a minor fine to continue leaking people's info)
Another point I wanted to make for you. I want to see anonymous identity tokens as that we're continuing on this path. For example: Hetzner is now requiring biometrics + id proof of who you are to pay them money for a server. I understand they want to avoid fraud and provide services to legitimate people, but that kind of info is insane to give to some random person at some corporation.
If you have an intelligent problem solving governance:
1. Acknowledge the problem
2. Seek a root cause
3. Attempt to mediate this issue at it's root. My uninformed, and unasked for, opinion on this is this is due to the adjustment of living situation and social expectations of that age group pushes their developing social environment to go global rather than staying local. (People are scared of their kids in the local community hanging out and social, where they've been stuck in doors playing xbox/tiktok).
4. In doing #4 attempt to mediate this issue with the parents. Don't try to punish people in the situation, provide acceptable alternatives to help people be better.
On a surface level:
1. Demonstrate in public a way that live without social media is a workable thing for people at that age
2. Provide mental health outreach for the effected people (This costs money so it's never done)
Large numbers of states actively monitor (via swiping IDs) your alcohol purchase history. Many states have entire bureaus whose job it is to keep this information.
I believe that Utah is one of those places who do that. (I can't find a resource that they do, but it's too similar to the patronscan tech that near by states endorse). That's one of the things that turned me away from enjoying that state.
From what I did find, they are required to keep that info for at least 7 days. As a Chicagoian, required tracking of how much and where I drink at is super concerning.
No, qualifying social media sites will need to see ID. The bill specifically mentions driver's license, passport, or birth certificate. Although this is a "think of the children" style law, all adults would also be affected.
Papers please. Want to speak and assemble online? I'm gonna need to see some papers first.
> SB152 requires social media companies to verify that users in the state are 18 or older to open an account. Minors will need parental consent to create an account.
> 246 (3) (a) Beginning March 1, 2024, a social media company shall verify the age of an
> 247 existing or new Utah account holder and, if the existing or new account holder is a minor,
> 248 confirm that a minor has consent as required under Subsection (1):
They totally punt on the issue of how you determine if an account is a minor:
> 256 (4) In accordance with Title 63G, Chapter 3, Utah Administrative Rulemaking Act, the
> 257 division, with consideration of stakeholder input, shall make rules to:
> 258 (a) establish processes or means by which a social media company may meet the age
> 259 verification requirements of this chapter;
> 260 (b) establish acceptable forms or methods of identification, which may not be limited
> 261 to a valid identification card issued by a government entity;
> 262 (c) establish requirements for providing confirmation of the receipt of any information
> 263 provided by a person seeking to verify age under this chapter;
It is not remotely clear how you are supposed to enforce this without requiring government id for all users. Or at least, Utah users.
There are already laws on the books in numerous states requiring porn sites to verify that users are over 18. As far as I know, none of them require users to upload a government ID. As usual I think HN is making leaps of logic without actually reading the law or thinking of how else users might be verified (A $0.10 refundable credit card charge for example).
To my knowledge no porn site requires anything beyond clicking "yes, I'm 18," which is the exact kind of "how old are you?" mechanism easily circumvented by teenagers. A credit card charge is not exactly less burdensome than providing state ID.
Is it a bad time to mention that sites like stack overflow, discord, sub stack, medium, Reddit, hacker news, GitHub, YouTube, and so forth have the same traits - the same identifying markers - as what we consider traditional social media sites?
How the bill defines social media:
10) (a) "Social media platform" means an online forum that a social media company
160 makes available for an account holder to:
161 (i) create a profile;
162 (ii) upload posts;
163 (iii) view the posts of other account holders; and
164 (iv) interact with other account holders or users.
There’s exceptions for email, Netflix, Amazon, news, traditional media kinds of sites.
Given how the government reps talked (hah) to the TikTok CEO, and some of the speeches leading up to that farce, I’m pretty convinced it’s entirely intentional.
It gives power and eyeballs back to the entrenched traditional media moguls.
There won’t be any. Look, it’s fun to imagine these shitty lawmakers getting bit by their own laws applied to the letter but that’s not how it will go. The law will only ever be enforced against social media platforms they see as threatening their ability to shelter their kids.
I think it says a lot about any politician that pushes for laws that are meant to be selectively enforced.
> Look, it’s fun to imagine these shitty lawmakers getting bit by their own laws applied to the letter but that’s not how it will go. The law will only ever be enforced against social media platforms they see as threatening their ability to shelter their kids.
It’ll be enforced against whoever individual citizens decide to enforce it against; its a purely private right of action.
Ah, that's the carveout against the 1st amendment.
Conservatives have discovered that the constitution only binds the state, so if they delegate enforcement to private lawsuits they can completely bypass protections.
I don't understand how any court allows this interpretation to exist. If a state deputizes a person to act against the rights of others, that person is acting as the state, and should be bound as the state is bound. Otherwise the state can abrogate all limitations on its powers by deputizing people or companies.
Because it turns out a lot of the higher courts in the US are absolutely captured by people who let their religion and or ideology and or private opinion affect their judicial decrees. This has been the case since even before Dread Scott though so I don't know why we have ever pretended otherwise
I haven't read the bills yet but according to the article it applies to children under 18.
17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsh*t, for the same reasons I would now. (So does dad me, incidentally. My kid's messages have always been her business, not mine.)
Reading these comments about people relying on SO - a site founded in 2008 - at age 11, doesn't make me feel any younger, and I'm not even that old (inching closer and closer to my mid-30s). I got into Linux and bash/Python scripting by following tutorials on random shady sites and reading official documentation and manpages. Let's just say it wasn't as seamless as Googling an issue and having a SO thread directly answer my question.
Yes, I do realize I now sound like I just said "back in my day, we walked to school, uphill both ways".
Yea, it was actually wild when SO came out, because I'd been teaching myself lua pretty much independently, and by the time I got to high school, SO just barely on its way out and immediately everything was a lot easier.
Old man yells at cloud, but kids these day won't even have to look at code, everything will be filtered through natural language.
"I feel old" on the internet can mean 15yo to 80yo, so you have all the right to feel old at mid-30s lol
When I learned my second programming language (JavaScript), I asked most of my questions via a mailing list. It's quite weird trying to recall it... I almost forgot how mailing list work today.
Right? I learned through reading browser documentation in elementary school when CSS and JavaScript were implemented and then running to my dad or internet forums/chat rooms when I ran into topics or problems I didn't understand. None of us knew what we were doing. It was great.
Certainly you participated in related forums right? Before SO I was much more involved in online communities like https://gamedev.net/ which are also at risk due to this sort of bill.
I actually did not, for some reason. I was on a bunch of phpBB forums in high school, but none surrounding programming/tech. I was obsessed with music and gaming way more than IT stuff, back then. I initially learned programming more as a means to an end (my first scripts were to automate backups to an external drive, transfer stuff between Windows/Linux, that kind of stuff), and just generally for my own enjoyment, than a real plan to do anything with it. I don't even think I realized it was a potential career path before I was already out of high school lol
The good part about the COPPA law is that it's an IQ test. If you're under 13, you have to be smart enough to understand that it's a "don't ask don't tell" situation and know to keep quiet. I did when I was 10 and joined Yahoo (the most popular social media site at the time) so I could have a Geocities web site and play fantasy baseball.
I'd suggest that teens in Utah just use a VPN but social media sites have been cracking down on VPN users for years and many of those sites now require phone number verification to sign up. This law illustrates yet another reason why that's a bad idea.
Looking back on my youth, I think these age verification check boxes were my earliest disregard for authority. I understood the checkboxes were there because there was a law that wanted to prevent me from accessing an online service. I thought the law was stupid, and after contemplating it for days decided to ignore it.
You underestimate how hard it might be to get your parent to sign some weird consent form from a "github" site, especially if it asks for a picture of the parent's ID (to ensure the kid isn't accepting the terms on their own behalf).
Technically it's not spelled out, but chances are Utah law enforcement / regulators won't accept a tech company's measures if a kid can just say another one of their own emails is their parents' and can then consent to the social media access themselves. Everyone affected by this will likely outsource it to a company like Stripe with their Identity product, where you're entrusting Stripe to do the ID verification and to delete the data once it's been verified.
> I’m sure our parents would have all let us sign up for a programming site. This bill still allows for that.
But would the site let you sign up if even with parental permission if it had to do additional identification verification to identify that the permission was from your parent, and was liable for (1) actual damages if you got addicted [0] because of some element of their site design, and (2) huge ($250,000 per feature) penalties if they also didn’t do quarterly audits to identify, and within 30 days after identification eliminate, any feature which might addict you?
How many programming sites see minors in general, much less Utah minors specifically, as that important to their mission to take on the extra costs and risks this bill imposes on serving that population?
[0] Using an intentionally broad definition of addiction
Reddit is also an incredible resource for niche, constructive topics like learning how to build a computer. You could draw the line anywhere you want for social media.
I mean, this is why it's a common thing to append reddit.com to your google searchs nowadays. Seeing how others solved problems or getting a feel for their opinions on certain things is actually super useful.
> I'm sure many of us wouldn't have been a programmer if we hadn't had access to SO/Github around 17.
I'm sure many of us didn't have any access to StackOverflow and GitHub when we were around 17 years old, because StackOverflow and GitHub didn't exist yet. For several of us, git didn't exist yet. Heck, for some of us, the web didn't exist yet!
I’m kind of surprised but also not surprised in the outrage over the “draconian bulls*t.” The problem I have as a parent is that I can see it causing real social damage to adults around me, my own kids, and kids around my kids. Anti-social behavior, Disrespect for authority, extreme violence is easy to see and normalized (stuff that would normally be considered traumatic), wokeness and anti-wokeness is normalized (must we all have such strong opinions?). I’m talking behavior way more at extreme ends of the polarized spectrum and at earlier ages than what I grew up around.
It’s basically force-fed opinions at a global scale, how can that possibly be healthy? We can barely fathom how this media impacts adults as it stands. All this clear evidence aside, I feel like it’s obvious, how can the absence of these things do any measurable harm to kids?
Regardless of your ethical stance on the subject, it would be a good exercise to consider who you're ok with determining what kind of content your children can view. Allowing a government to step in to pass laws like this is a draconian step too far.
As a parent do you not already have all the tools you need to ensure your children don't use tik Tok? From the light touch and mundane, using the built in features of the operating system (parental blockers and app timers are available on Android and IOS) to the heavy touch of not allowing your kid to have a smartphone.
Why do you want the government taking over this role for you? Maybe there's some parents who don't care if their children are on tik tok. Why should they follow the same parental strategy you have?
I do think this a reasonable rebuttal, but there must be some middle ground here. Generally speaking, I can block TikTok sure, but because it’s so ubiquitous, my kids are ostracized because all their friends have access to it, they still pass around the content like drugs, alcohol and tobacco. It almost becomes one of those things that because they’re not allowed to have access to it, it does just as much damage, socially.
There are three general categories of parents on this, and to be clear, I don’t think any of these are bad parents:
1. Those who are extremely weary and tech savvy, like myself
2. Those who are weary but have no earthly idea how to set up these controls effectively.
3. Those who don’t give a f*all about it at all.
I tend to believe it’s just as bad but it’s about as misunderstood as tobacco used to be. The industry KNOWS it’s bad for kids, it’s been proven bad for kids but it’s peddled to them anyway.
All that aside, let’s just say hypothetically I wanted to manage this all myself and wanted the government out of it, sounds good in theory. The tooling around limiting inappropriate content is mind-blowingly inadequate. At the very least this should be mandatory and more concretely standardized. I’m not flatly against giving kids some access to it but it’s reached a point where my kids can’t even do their homework at all without full access to all of Youtube which by itself has loads of content not remotely appropriate for elementary school kids. Youtube kids is a joke.
It’s pretty frustrating as a parent to manage content restrictions for the 3-4 major browsers, search engines, youtube, messenging apps, iphones, macbook, windows app store, and so on. This could be a full time job. Then, the kids bring home a school provided chromebook or login to chrome with a school account which has no content restrictions at all and I have zero control over anyway. Honestly, parental controls in the current state is largely a waste of time.
The overhead of managing content restrictions on families devices is a very good point. I'll be reaching this stage soon and I'm not looking forward to this additional task.
I also think state sponsored content moderation should be used to restrict access to harmful online media as opposed to lumbering this task on individuals. As you've mentioned, some parents need this enforced upon them.
If we were talking about vaping, which is still highly unregulated and available for children to buy, I'm sure the majority would be in agreement about age restrictions. The fact that we're talking about preventing psychological addiction and trauma makes it harder for people to agree on the harmful effects of this type of content. It's simply not as visible as the huge plumes of oil-steam breathed out by every 12 year old in a bus stop these days.
However, I don't agree with the implementation of content moderation proposed by Utah state. It's totally unworkable and poorly thought through.
I mean it’s somewhat true, if it were legal for 12 year olds to have these things AND it was marketed toward them, way more kids would be have it than not. That’s not to say they can’t get it now, but it’s harder and somewhat self regulating because the stigma around doing something illegal.
This doesn’t invalidate your point (I think your correct that making it illegal provides a disincentive and reduces overall uptake), but I should note that making something legal does not necessarily mean making it legal to market it towards kids.
Case in point being that here in the UK it is illegal to market tobacco products at all (including to adults in this case). This also applies to politicians, prescriptions medicine and a bunch of other things. And IMO it’s often a good compromise that allows for harm reduction without outright banning something.
This probably varies depending on where you live, but where I grew up (in a small town in the UK), the vast majority of 13 year olds did have access to drugs, alcohol and tobacco (which didn't necessarily mean the vast majority were indulging in those things, but they were definitely available).
Yes, parental controls are not are replacement for teaching kids why this stuff is damaging. It’s not an excuse to be lazy parents. Kids need to hear their parents say it (with the why). Setting limits instead outright blocking can be helpful. It sets the stage for letting the kid decide if they would consider what they just watched be viewed as inappropriate, which believe or not does happen, but some content really shouldn’t be available to them at all.
I also want to recognize that in the case of Utah’s implementation，it likely doesn’t have my best interests in mind so I do see your point. There’s always a possibility of an agenda which isn’t necessarily “good for kids.”
Maybe what we should focus on is more standardization, effectiveness of controls and requiring these trillion dollar companies to build parents one single pane of glass to monitor and control content for all platforms. May not even be feasible but it really just sounds like another engineering challenge that requires a major investment to get it done.
Many of us, older people, had access to similar things that made us interested... in the 70/80's it was computer magazines (paper magazines, that is) as people got their first home computers and could follow along programming examples, play games etc. If you ran into trouble, you needed either help from someone you already knew or you would have to find a book or manual.
In the 90's most teens already had access to a primitive internet where they could chat with anyone in the world using BBS[1], which was not too different from a modern social network. Email was already a thing as well for some time, but probably became widespread at this time... by the late 90's the internet was already quite similar to today for geeks, except perhaps videos (and even high resolution pics) were not a thing due to the low speed of the net.
StackOverflow and GitHub only came around in the late 2000's, which is basically yesterday. Before them, there were similar sites as well (the infamous expertsexchange for SO, and SourceFourge for GH, for example) for quite some time, but they surely became very dominant in their areas.
And I know these. I'm not "punched card old" but I did start learning programming before SO got traction. And I remember how big the difference SO made for my own learning/career path, compared to mailing lists.
As a side note, my first intern job was to make a localized ripoff of SO (within a team, of course). It was still a relatively shining new thing by the time.
Cool... it's just that your comment seems to imply that a lot of programmers were learning their basics when SO was already there to help us... that's only true for those of us lucky enough to be really young, like in their 20's :D. Hope you understand many of us are well past that and watched GH and SO take over the world as a very recent phenonenom.
Uh, yes, this is why I said "many of us" not "most of us". (not sure why i need to repeat this...) Of course I know people who are in 20s are not necessarily the absolute majority of HN. But there are still many of them.
Wow I'm almost 50 and I have been interacting through forums (first one on minitel when I was 12), bbs, newsgroup since I was a young teenager. Maybe github or stackoverflow didn't exist but they were plenty of cool places where to exchange.
Haha...I learned when the web was mainly AOL. MSN at the time had pretty good forums which helped a lot. But the main place I was learning programming from was books, but they were expensive - especially for a college kid. When I would run into problems I couldn't solve I would head to the book store with a pencil and paper and copy bits and pieces that I hoped would help. Then head back home and try again (talk about a long debug run loop). Luckily this was around the same time of the rise of big bookstores where they encouraged hanging out so no one ever questioned me.
I remember having to send an email to the admin of sourceforge for permission to have a project and thus CVS access. "Please sir may I contribute to open source?"
I probably wouldn't be a programmer without ordering floppy disks full of random source code by post from software-by-post catalogues - one letter to ask for a catalogue, get the catalogue in the post, send them a letter with your order and a cheque and receive a bunch of disks a week later...
Oh I have a lot of ideas. I started learning programming before Stackoverflow got traction. Plus I'm not a native speaker and by the time I didn't really speak English at all. So I practically needed to learn what "Reached end of file while parsing" means in plain English, then tried to find out that I had missed a semicolon :'(
> 17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsht, for the same reasons I would now.
If anyone thinks that this bill is going to keep 17 year olds from accessing everything from Reddit to GitHub, they are going to be very disappointed.
It's kind of wild to see so much of these comments insisting that anyone under the age of 18 be locked up and prevented from accessing basic internet sites and* encouraging laws that would force every site to implement strict ID verification just to use it.
Did everyone just forget what it was like to grow up with draconian content blockers at school preventing you from getting to benign information on the internet?
most school content blockers were pretty easily bypassed in my experience. i was in school relatively recently, my highschool had fortinet which sucked (sni blocking + blocks a bunch of protocols), but tor still got through if i used a bridge. i probably could've used a vpn but tor was easier. before highschool there wasn't anything more than dns filtering (and briefly http host blocking but not sni blocking) which was bypassed by approximately everyone (who wanted to bypass it). most people used random vpn apps, i changed dns, both worked fine.
Hacker News had a good run. I'm going to miss it when it's decided that tracking enough PII on its users to be compliant with this law (and the ones that will follow) is more trouble than it's worth to Y-Combinator, but so it goes.
The open forum era was a grand experiment, and the experiment is winding down.
Can you not just vpn in to Canada with me for the time being? I mean hopefully they don’t implement it site wide for all regions I can’t imagine them doing that.
This is a Utah law and for now I don’t think most companies will implement it site wide but rather just comply with state laws. So vpn into Canada would not trigger the age verification.
That won't be sufficient for companies to comply with the law. The way Utah's law is structured it is incumbent upon the company to determine whether a user is a Utah citizen or not. I haven't seen anything to suggest the courts will decide that a simple IP address filter is sufficient to be considered compliant.
If Github wasn’t confident that (10)(b)(i)(N) excluded them from coverage, they probably wouldn’t allow Utah minors to use the site at all (and the same would be true of any other covered or potentially covered site) because, even if they are allowed parental access, of the civil penalty and actual damages for “causing addiction” (under the statute’s non-clinical definition of “addiction”), only the civil penalty portion of which is avoidable with costly quarterly audits. It is a whole bunch of dumbass liability that can be almost entirely mitigated by excluding Utah minors, and if that does economic and developmental harm to Utah, that’s not the sites’ problem.
Ends up being this weird blend of "disturbing kid crack" videos that you really shouldn't leave a child unattended with. The whole "Peppa Pig Drinks Bleach" stuff was only the shallow end of the darkness of the stuff generally tossed in the "Elsagate" category.
There is no "safe" way for a... oh, 2-7 year old, I'll be nice, to use the internet unattended. I've seen an awful lot of it out and about.
I've found YouTube kids content to be significantly worse than general YouTube content. Not to say that there isn't a lot of content inappropriate for kids on YouTube, but the Kids version is explicitly designed to target kids with addictive content. The advertisers targeting children for their products is brutal on YouTube Kids. Since pushing my kids onto the full YouTube, they are consuming better content.
90%+ of the useful interactions I have with other humans working on interesting problems is through Discord these days. If I have an issue with a library, or run into a tough to solve physics problem, basically anything where I might want to talk to someone more knowledgeable or experienced than me the answer is hop on a discord server and ask. It's absolutely asinine to deny this resource to kids.
At least we're teaching kids the basics of computer security by forcing them to circumvent these restrictions, and I have full faith than they will. Most kids are much more technologically literate than someone who would unironically type "groomercord".
Discord is where my friend runs his youth DM games where he carves out a safe space for teens to dip their feet into playing D&D and having healthy interactions with adults on his discord server. We keep it PG-13 and it’s fun. I’ve been giving a kid pointers on AI art generation.
It’d be sad if all them got run off because of hysteria about them being “groomed”.
Stack overflow and GitHub both allow you to make public posts and interact with others. The text targets public user posts and interactions between users explicitly.
Whether the consequences are intentional or not is still to be determined.
Well, here’s their definition of such a company (from the same link):
155 (9) "Social media company" means a person or entity that:
156 (a) provides a social media platform that has at least 5,000,000 account holders
157 worldwide; and
158 (b) is an interactive computer service.
So, size is really the only relevant discriminator.
> None of which clearly protect GH or SO, the subjects of this thread branch.
I disagree, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35310413 (especially considering that because this law creates a penalty, and because it restricts speech, its definitions of the covered parties and conduct must be read narrowly – and its exceptions read broadly [0] – per the rule of lenity in statutory construction.)
[0] if, in the first instance, it is Constitutional at all.
> There’s exceptions for email, Netflix, Amazon, news, traditional media kinds of sites.
The fact that there are 20 categories of services exempted shows that this is a terrible bill that is based on punishing specific actors and not regulating data privacy or child wellbeing in a meaningful way.
for reference, line 165 to 224 of that link are the exceptions:
"Social media platform" does not include an online service, website, or application: (i) where the predominant or exclusive function is:
(A) electronic mail; (B) direct messaging [only between two users], (C) a streaming service, (D) news, sports, entertainment, or other content that is preselected by the provider and not user generated, (E) online shopping or e-commerce [when limited to posting reviews and wish lists], (F) interactive gaming, virtual gaming, or an online service, that allows the creation and uploading of content for the purpose of interactive gaming, edutainment, or associated entertainment, (G) photo editing that has an associated photo hosting service, if the interaction with
other users or account holders is generally limited to liking or commenting, (H) a professional creative network for showcasing and discovering artistic content, (J) providing career development opportunities, including professional networking, job skills, learning certifications, and job posting and application services, (K) business to business software, (L) a teleconferencing or videoconferencing service, (M) cloud storage, (N) shared document collaboration, (O) cloud computing services, (P) providing access to or interacting with data visualization platforms, libraries, (Q) to permit comments on a digital news website, if the news content is posted only by the provider of the digital news website, (R) providing or obtaining technical support for a platform, product, or service, (S) academic or scholarly research, (T) genealogical research
LOL, according to this, my family's group text thread is illegal under this law, as DMs can only be between 2 people.
EDIT: serious question; would Slack be professional networking or, how does that work under this bill? It's DMing for business, but it isn't really networking.
Group chats wouldn't be illegal, that's not an online service where you sign up and make a profile etc. This applies only to sites that would serve you random content from random users... i.e. Social Media.
> (I) shared between the sender and the recipient;
171 (II) only visible to the sender and the recipient; and
172 (III) are not posted publicly;
maybe sender and recipient can be considered a group chat with multiple recipients? Otherwise you wouldn't classify something like Kik or Discord as social media.
I’m not opposed to the idea of whitelisting healthy online activities and limiting anything else. They could go further and whitelist sites like HN, arch forums etc where it’s educational
Sibling comment mentioned how group chats aren’t exempted. I’ve seen group chats get very unhealthy before. 2 is low, maybe 5 or 8 participants max would be ok.
I hope you realize that every adult in the state will now have to verify their state ID to use an account on virtually any website so that the site can prove they're only serving adults. These lists of IDs will leak.
I mean when teens/children congregate in large numbers anywhere they get unhealthy. Like it or not, the digital realm is part of life and they have to learn to handle disagreements, toxic people, etc. at some point. If their adults won't supervise them/help them, that's on the adults. If they can't, then our society needs to start educating adults on how to parent in the digital age. But that would be slow and cost $$$ and possibly empower the populace, so we won't do it.
>(F) interactive gaming, virtual gaming, or an online service, that allows the creation and uploading of content for the purpose of interactive gaming, edutainment, or associated entertainment,
So Roblox, arguably quite harmful to children, is specifically carved out. That's great.
The church is often on their "team" so it gets a pass for rampant child abuse. Notice none of the groomer allegations are directed at the church despite the church abusing exponentially more children than people in drag. There is no global drag organization which is protecting members found to be abusing children by moving them into new areas where people don't know their priest is a pedophile the way we see in the church. If the "protect children" cries were honest, the churches and clergy should be one of the primary targets.
> Nearly 1,700 priests and other clergy members that the Roman Catholic Church considers credibly accused of child sexual abuse are living under the radar with little to no oversight from religious authorities or law enforcement, decades after the first wave of the church abuse scandal roiled U.S. dioceses, an Associated Press investigation has found.
> These priests, deacons, monks and lay people now teach middle-school math. They counsel survivors of sexual assault. They work as nurses and volunteer at nonprofits aimed at helping at-risk kids. They live next to playgrounds and daycare centers. They foster and care for children.
> And in their time since leaving the church, dozens have committed crimes, including sexual assault and possessing child pornography, the AP’s analysis found.
Highly addictive to my kids for reasons that I can't grok.
Unfettered social interaction with other participants in an unmonitored environment that superficially 'looks' like a video game. This social interaction leads to bullshit purchases. Not purchasing the bullshit leads to peer pressure and bullying.
Is it a technical problem? is it lack of content moderation? or do social networks that are catered towards children simply lead to a toxic environment? I can't say if it's more one or the other, which makes it a challenge to try and fix.
I watch my son play Roblox sometimes. The chat is heavily censored.
He also learned most countries, their capitals, and their flags. And that was just a few servers with "country balls".
I find the YouTube videos involving those far more insidious, because children don't really understand biting sarcasm and satire as well as adults, and I'll often make him switch videos.
But I haven't noticed anything necessarily harmful about Roblox.
Then again, don't they make like a billion dollars a year?
I'm more upset that they screw content creators so badly that the "bullying and peer pressure" seems to be necessary.
Roblox is one of those things that seems impossible on a technical level. And with a billion dollars, they could hire social workers, moderators, etc.
But have you actually played Roblox? It’s absolute toxic trash.
Almost every single game is a front for purchases, and those that aren’t are barely games at all. Many Minecraft mods are one time purchases that are way, way better than anything Roblox produces, but Minecraft is so buggy that it’s truly not suitable for kids, or anyone for that matter. Minecraft will continuously corrupt saves, so you need to fully reinstall the game, and log out of your Xbox/MS account and fail to authorize.
I grew up on counterstrike and StarCraft mods, and there is nothing available today that fills the same role. I’ve played chess implemented in StarCraft, DOTA before it was standalone, and zombies maps that wouldn’t be brought to other shooters for years ahead of time.
My kids aren’t allowed to play games I wouldn’t play. The list of actual-games-that-arent-ads is huge, and there is no need to let in Roblox.
This is such a difficult topic. On one hand I want to give the next generation the same freedoms that I enjoyed but on the other hand the “game” has gotten more… everything. Even adults can’t avoid falling for these traps. I’ve seen with my own eyes someone justifying spending USD 90+ on candy crush saying it isn’t that much compared to bla bla.
It is a frightening thought though to think — am I more conservative than my parents?
I'm certainly not. Though i have different conservations in different directions than they could've ever dreamed possible, i doubt that adds up to anywhere near the real conservatism of watching Bill O'Reilly or god forbid Tucker Carlson every night
considering nintendo and sega cartridges were upwards of 60 1980s US dollars, compared to the amount of "game" we get now for the same price, it's almost a wash.
Freemium games make sure there's enough "there" there to keep casuals almost happy. The trick is to make the $5 and $10 premium purchases let you do around 4-12 hours of gameplay advancement, but that's it. Consider something like Shop heroes (or whatever) where you can put thousands of hours into the game for free, a day or two "skip" for $10 isn't a good value proposition. But skipping a week or a month? maybe after someone has put $10 in a few or several times and gotten that little jolt they want to feel the big jolt of a lot of money.
I know i spent around $100 in the blizzard RMAH (Real Money Auction House) on diablo III and it netted me nothing - nothing at all. So i learned my lesson real quick. Real money for virtual goods is a non-starter.
Now as far as robux goes, I want my child to understand that it's ok to pay people for their work (designing the levels, making items/skins). So he can choose to spend his money on hotwheels, paints, robux, google giftcards, whatever, $5 at a time. I do sometimes make a frowny face when he chooses robux, though; because as i said, a billion dollars!
I would not let my child pay for in app purchases period. They are entirely built to trigger the same broken mental pathways as gambling and we generally try to avoid letting kids gamble
Sure sounds like a game that will suck and go unplayed if kids just aren't allowed to click the buy button. Children don't have to have access to spend money online and a parent is well within their right already to not add a credit card.
That one change would make Robolox a terrible game based on how you described it. Isn't that problem solved without the need for a complex law full of arbitrary definitions and one-off carve outs?
> Minecraft is so buggy that it’s truly not suitable for kids, or anyone for that matter.
> Minecraft will continuously corrupt saves you need to fully reinstall the game
I don't recognize the game you are describing. I've never heard of a paid minecraft mod, they're all free. Buggy? It has some odd in-game behavior that you could reasonably call bugs, but the only crashes I've ever gotten were during modding, caused by incompatible or low quality mods. Corrupting saves? I've never experienced it, nor can I imagine how a corrupted save would be addressed by reinstalling the game. What is the supposed connection between a save file being corrupted and needing to reinstall the entire game?
You've obviously got some strange prejudices about this game which simply don't resemble reality.
There's a game engine/a large variety of games combined with a common community. The games can be silly, but they're silly with other people who recognize they're silly, and others who aren't in on the joke yet
My kids never paid anything on roblox. Also, the bullying you describe sounds like issue with real world bullies in group ofnkids your kids know personally. That sux and is hard to fix, but blaming roblox is weird. I would blame those kids parents.
That sounds a lot like any other childhood in my opinion. Sure I wasn't feeling pressured to buy digital assets on an online game but I would noticed when half the school has the same LL Bean fleece jacket or backpack with their initials embroidered on it.
Was there peer pressure and potential for bullying based on what others had? Absolutely. Should a state have intervened with a required mandatory dress code and government-approved backpack? Hell no, there's always going to be peer pressure and bullying no matter how oppressive laws become.
Basically every negative aspect of modern gaming at once. Loot boxes, exploitative use of user-created content, unmoderated interaction between adults and children, free-to-play treadmilling to peer pressure children into spending money, etc etc.
I don't know how to judge a bill, but I read this, and it seems that the intent is to broadly ban everything first and then carve out exceptions for almost everything except for a single category: Direct messaging (^B) between MORE than two users for non-creative, non-commercial, non-educational purposes.
AKA forums and memes.
Is that a fair analysis?
[edit] : per privacy advocates - no, I don't think it's okay to start with a law that bans everything and carve out exceptions; obviously, that way lies totalitarianism. I'm just trying to get a handle on the immediate intent. There's a boolean at work here. I guess someone was like, "hey, why chip away at forums and meme sites when we can just ban everything in theory, let most of it slide, and work back toward totalitarianism from there with the law already in place?"
[edit2] HN appears to be totally banhammered under this since /the mods/ don't post the news.
Ooh I’m curious to hear more. Do you have inside knowledge, or see widespread evidence of bots? I’ve only seen perhaps a few here and there, almost always downvoted to oblivion.
It's not just bots posting, but other bots upvoting those posts. If it can get on the bottom of the front page for even 5 minutes, that's probably x > 1000 clicks.
Because every law we write is ultimately arbitrary. Lines have to be drawn through massive swaths of gray area, those lines are entirely arbitrary and should be a sign that making laws like this is pointless.
The 90s Era gun ban that Biden was so proud of is a perfect example. They had to include so many caveats and arbitrary descriptions of what makes a gun an "assault rifle" that manufacturers just dodged the rules with tweaked rifle designs. Something as small as a thumb hole in the grip made a gun legal because of how specific the law had to be.
In this case, what stops a social media company from coming up with some business model where a child company is spun up for every 4.9m users? You could argue its more like Mastodon, a decentralized network that just happens to use the same proprietary protocol, app, and is owned by the same parent Corp.
Marginalium: Some laws are arbitrary, not all. They may all be contingent, which is different from arbitrary. Ultimately, law is a prudential determination of moral principle.
The distinction between arbitrary and contingent is very muddy in a legal sense where arbitrary has a specific meaning related to laws and court decisions. The two relevant definitions of arbitrary are:
> based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something
> law : depending on individual discretion (as of a judge) and not fixed by law
A law itself fits the first definition. At best, a law is written by a tiny minority of the population but with the intent of best reflecting the majority opinion or preference.
I'd be really interested to hear an example of a law that is based on necessity or intrinsic nature, though maybe there are a few!
It matters because that’s the cutoff in the law. If you want to know why that’s the cutoff in the law, that’s a question for the authors, sponsors, and supporters of the law.
Kids can be mean to each other, now or in your day. Next they ban kids from talking to each other in person or having friends. Is that the life you want for your daughter?
Guess we should ban all teens from stack overflow, LinkedIn, and hacker news because kids might have toxic interactions online if we don't.
Let's also not mention how the only way to reliably do this is to require identity verification from all adults. Get ready to scan your drivers license to post on hacker news and every other site (except traditional news sites apparently).
Utah is small enough that some sites may just geoblock Utah. I know if I had to choose between collecting every user's ID ever and just adding a block list, I'd go with the second.
> (F) interactive gaming, virtual gaming, or an online service, that allows the creation and uploading of content for the purpose of interactive gaming, edutainment, or associated entertainment,
Doesn't this loophole even defeat their own hidden agenda? Almost every online game today features a chat function.
content that is generated by an account holder, or uploaded to or shared on the
270 platform by an account holder, that may be encountered by another account holder;
The list of bills that don't require long lists of arbitrary definitions and exceptions is ridiculously small.
Making laws that cover millions of people is way too complex for something so detailed. There's no way around that complexity leading to a pile of garbage legal mumbo-jumbo as they realize it's nearly impossible to draw a neat line around the problem.
This is the area that gets grey. If the provide applies any filter or AI judgement it becomes preselected. This applies to tiktok, facebook, youtube and ig.
This law bans old school forums and reddit but not if results are displayed by "best match"
(G) photo editing that has an associated photo hosting service, if the interaction with
other users or account holders is generally limited to liking or commenting
Does this mean the 2012 version of Instagram is rendered immune to this law thanks to this obnoxious Google Photos carveout?
I don’t consider Reddit, HN, etc. to be social media, at all. There might be media, but there is no social. Social requires a network of real people. You can’t prove that anyone on these sites is a real person, other than yourself. Maybe I, and everyone else on here, is a bot. When everyone is anonymous, there is no network. And, not only is everyone anonymous, but there are no connections. To the best of my knowledge I have never read a post or comment from the same “person” twice. Every single interaction might as well be (and probably is) our first interaction on the site, ever. Complete strangers passing in the dark.
Can a site without discrete named accounts, where everyone is called 'Anonymous', claim that there's no way to verify whether the content is generated by humans? It's basically the 4chan model.
If we ignore the content associated with them, 4chan and other imageboards are actually a nice low-speed format for casual online interaction: the content is divided into threads, the board catalog can only hold some amount of active threads, threads have a finite lifespan measured by post count, threads are auto-pruned after a while, there's no secret sauce algorithm to game your attention span (catalog has simple rules for sorting by thread activity and such), visual content is limited, etc.
Reddit used to have an actual community, things like in person meetups and its own culture based on various in-jokes (bacon,narwhals, etc) and behavior expectations. It was pretty social I'd say, though now it's basically just an aggreator and not that different from google news for various interests.
There is a point to be made that anything coming from Meta is just designed by its makers to destroy your mental health for ad clicks. Other companies do not have such toxic business model even Tiktok.
If the US government had control of an app in China or Russia used by tens of millions of impressionable young people do any of you really think they would not take advantage of that to tip the scales and slowly affect political opinions and other outcomes?
Mass media did it from the start, but was less effective because they were trying to create "one size fits all" narratives that could reach and influence very large portions of the population. Recommendation engines tuned to the individual changed the game dramatically. They can lead people down rabbit holes that the other people in their life don't even know to exist. At least when the town newspaper or local church starts shilling some truly wacky shit, everybody in town knows about it. But now youtube/etc personalized recommendation engines can send your brother or father down radicalization paths you never even heard of before and had no possible way of noticing before the damage was done.
If you think "Oh I'll just watch youtube to get an idea of what other people are watching", you're stuck in 20th century thinking. It doesn't work like that anymore, youtube/etc are fundamentally unlike old media. These systems have atomized society in a way that newspapers never could.
They existed prior and yes have been elevated since SM. Not necessarily because of SM, but because SM can take the blame while those who drive the wedge get a free pass.
As a parent, restricting social media is one of the most effective tools I think we have to promote well being. The things you mentioned are also problematic but I can limit social media access and when I do my kids are better off.
My point is, blaming SM and only SM is a (false) oversimplification. There are systematic societal issues getting a free pass because of our collective willingness to buy into a distraction that the cause is SM.
Just because adults have normalized the baggage of negativity and lack of progress doesn't mean the kids aren't feeling beyond the lies. FFS, any reasonable adult should be feeling pain and distraught at this point.
p.s. I forgot to mention climate change / environmental damage. Imagine being young and thinking "someday this shit-show will be mine." It's foolish and naive to blame SM for this.
But I also don't think my teenagers are nearly as concerned about climate change and the world they are inheriting as they are living up to the life social media says they should have and feeling inadequate being unable to attain it.
Is this a bit like "what about all the other cancers?!" in a discussion about breast cancer? It's not as though this prevents action/attention for poverty or other issues. It's one tack of many, whether you agree or not with the plan itself.
We’ve always had endless wars, endless poverty, endless divisiveness, endless media fearmongering, etc. Those things have all been much worse in the past than they are today (maybe not the media fearmongering). But youth (and adults too) weren’t exposed to it every waking minute of their day the way they are today.
The children of North America have by in large not experienced war themselves in well over a century, with cartel violence being the standout counterexample of sorts. More lost parents to wars, but the Vietnam War was now a few generations ago and the "wars on terror" effected only tens thousands of North American families in this way, counting all casualties not just fatalities. Tens of thousands sounds like a lot but this country has hundreds of millions of people, so you can hardly explain broad social trends with this.
So how else might wars be effecting children in North America? Well for one, children may become depressed after watching tons of graphic foreign war footage online... on social media.....
5 million is not a lot, especially if you're just counting the number of users in your DB. Something like MAUs would be a better metric, but would still include things like Steam.
The Democrats have their own flaws certainly, but I’m having such a hard time finding a consistent ideology among conservatives. Free speech absolutism, mixed with parent choice, no choice for women, censorship for some kinds of speech, anti-regulation limited government but strong regulation of tech products. I just can’t square any of this.
Look, I’ll take a risk here and speak my thoughts, assuming you genuinely want to learn more about Republicans in 2023.
It’s confusing because they aren’t unified. I was a Democrat until 2015, when it felt like both sides had lost their mind and I voted libertarian. It seemed like there was no place for free speech advocates in the Democrat party anymore.
Eventually, my wife and I decided to become officially Republican when we realized that the Libertarians were totally ineffective as a party (the libertarian convention is literally just an excuse to have orgies and do drugs) and couldn’t fight back against the progressive ideology that we see as harmful towards successful child rearing, as well as us retaining a principled moral stance for free speech against the primarily leftist ideologies that had become so pervasive in social media circles. We feel like Elon Musk purchasing Twitter was one of the most important positive events of 2022, and a huge win for free speech.
There’s a lot of weird transition going on in the Republican Party because of this new group of “former Democrat refugees” who tend to be libertarian and free speech supporters are trying to integrate with the old guard republicans. We roll our eyes at this kind of stuff, but figure “it’s better than the crazy stuff going on these days on the other side”. Republican is turning into a much wider tent.
I don't know if there's a term for this fallacy, but I see it happening all the time. You're trying to break the world down to us-vs-them where "us" is a single narrowly defined group and "them" is everyone outside that group. In this case you're incorrectly grouping together classical liberals, neocons, Christian/Jewish/Islamic fundamentalists, Laissez-faire neoliberals, and paleoconservatives. Then being confused why they all disagree on different issues.
> I’m having such a hard time finding a consistent ideology among conservatives
I'm having a hard time figuring out why you would expect to find one. The people who "vote conservative" do so for numerous different sorts of reasons, conservationism is not their root ideology, it is downstream of other disparate ideologies. A conservative voter who is Mormon has different motivations than a conservative voter who is a secular small business owner, and both have a different root ideology from an old school Catholic or an anti-communist Cuban-American.
Knowing this as I'm sure you do, why would you expect "conservatism", aka "voting for republicans", to be a consistent ideology? The people who do so were never all coming from the same ideological position in the first place.
Btw, the group of people who vote for democratic candidates also do so for a wide array of reasons, and don't all share much of a common and consistent ideology either. Welcome to the two-party system, in which innumerable ideologies get pigeonholed into two bins.
Its always crazy to me how proponents and opponents never address each other’s points. They just talk past each other saying their own completely unrelated points.
A: “But what about kids in abusive households that get cut off from communication”
B: “We have tools to ensure kids safety that requires actively using our social network already”
It annoys me that they are presented as opposites, people segregate themselves as if they are opposites, imagine the other side is opposite, and then when you actually look at the stances they aren't opposite at all and probably actually reconcilable
but yes, “opposing” is more accurate than opposite. people just seem to only have the mental capacity for two opposites
> The bills also impose a social media curfew that blocks children's access between 22:30 and 06:30, unless adjusted by their parents.
The main bill is a possibly a bit overreaching but I’m fully in favour of this part. There’s a huge problem where I live with kids just not going to school and many of those same kids are staying up until 1am each night doom scrolling or watching YouTube.
> Now I'm more successful (and better educated) than almost everyone I grew up with
You realize you might be something of an outlier, right? Most teenagers are dramatically sleep-deprived, more so than teens of your generation. Your experience won't generalize.
> This law is just religious fundamentalist tradlife censorship dressed up in the moral panic of the moment.
How would you know you’re better educated? Seems like precisely the type of thing you can’t judge about yourself very well and the Dunning-Kruger effect doesn’t bode well for you either.
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[ 14.2 ms ] story [ 1049 ms ] threadAnd then everyone in between.
"...Meta said it has robust tools to keep children safe."
Sure.
--
Watching the socials get lumped into the same moral category as cigarettes, domestic abuse, the Sacklers, and cable news, is giving me a bit of schadenfreude.
Don't worry. My joy won't last.
Yeah, target the one group who consistently shows up to vote…
But the US Constitution doesn't guarantee anyone will be listening.
The only the US does relatively well is to provide mechanisms to reverse course when these things happen. Which is also why a lot of changes end up in gridlock.
Which I suspect will happen soon in this case.
I don't think there is any empirical evidence correlating tech addiction to income, but if there was I wouldn't be surprised if the relationship was positive.
No.
I think it's more likely to see intelligence agencies insist on more direct control over stopping "viral" spread of "disinformation", and to at least threaten to hold platforms responsible.
by trying to put some age limit on things, they're forcing absolutely everyone to give up their identity to the government / sites.
If this is 100% true in its face it would look identical to if it was a scheme to de-anonymize people.
With a little modern cryptography you can make this protocol so that the age verifier gets no information about what sites you are using the age verification with, and the other sites gets nothing that ties the identity used with the age verifier site to the identity you are at the other site.
What about adults? They may be lying kids. So either no access (safer) or strict age checks involving checking licenses and stuff. But that’s expensive. No Utah is easier.
How do you know they’re in Utah? IP addresses. Blocks people outside Utah? Sorry, our lawyers made us do this. Complain to your reps that Utah is messing with your state’s citizens. VPNs? Maybe gotta block that too.
Utah is not a big state. The social networks could easily use this to try to “teach a lesson”. Just say you’ll let Utahans back in when their government makes a foolproof age verification system.
And wait.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the intent of the law, it just seems unenforceable/unimplementable, as usual. No benefit to the social networks but huge legal downsides.
Be careful what you wish for ;-)
Social networks, for all their faults, are not pure evil. They can be beneficial for some people.
If you join Facebook, it doesn’t signal anything because everyone is on Facebook. Or Instagram. Or TikTok. Or any of the other called out platforms.
Notwithstanding the fact that many so-called marginalized minorities are also terribly bullied online.
Is this not exactly them telling people how to live their lives? "Live offline."
That has never worked before. I don't think it'll work in the future.
It's not about every aspect of life but a few key norms. I see this predatory social media like gambling if not worse, and gambling is regulated in most places
It would be a VERY interesting natural experiment if it stayed in effect. People would find ways back on, but not everyone would be willing to go through the hoops. What would that do in even a month or two?
...and that's why the first amendment exists.
What is amazing is that they have this strong stance on how to restrictively govern the people inside their borders, but yet expect to have a western lifestyle support them. More organizations should stand up and say "I'll pass" in a blanket ban on them.
I think you're crossing a line here. You are accusing the Mormons in Utah of having a us-versus-them mentality. But your own comment tries to turn readers against Mormons.
Never forget: The Missouri Executive Order 44, also known as the Mormon Extermination Order, was issued on October 27, 1838, by Governor Lilburn Boggs. The order authorized the expulsion of Mormons from the state and is sometimes referred to as the "Mormon Kill Law". However, the order was rescinded by Governor Christopher S. "Kit" Bond in 1976.
I think we should all be more charitable to Mormons after what they've been through.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/8:_The_Mormon_Proposition
Would be a huge win for all parents. No social media, and we don't have to be the bad guys taking it away.
> legislates away industries because you don't want to handle the parenting yourself.
What are your thoughts on pharmaceutical/heroin legislation? What are your thoughts on making it illegal to advertise unhealthy food to kids? How do you feel about the idea of product placement in children's TV shows? How do you feel about letting pharmaceutical companies directly market to children?
You look at parenting as black and white. Good parents would prevent their kids from doing bad things. Bad parents can't prevent their kids from doing bad things. "If a kid does something bad then it is because they have bad parents."
The reality is that parents are just one element of the childs environment and that their choice to do bad things can be fit to a bell curve based on the complete set of environmental factors for which parenting is one element.
Holding parenting ability constant, the government could make changes that would improve outcomes for some set of children.
Sorry, I don't know what this means.
> What are your thoughts on pharmaceutical/heroin legislation? What are your thoughts on making it illegal to advertise unhealthy food to kids? How do you feel about the idea of product placement in children's TV shows? How do you feel about letting pharmaceutical companies directly market to children?
The comment this chain is replying to was about tech companies not offering their services at all in Utah. I'd think, for the most part, I'd be against most regulations that basically say "to protect the children, we will ban X for everyone". I'm sure there are exceptions though.
> ...rest of the comment
I agree, the government can act to improve the outcomes for children and I didn't state anything to the contrary. Rather, I believe that gleefully accepting or cheering on a ban of all technology, for both adults and children, that the government might believe causes harm to children is quite unfortunate.
You called something hyperbole. You said you had a hard time imagining someone in good faith wishing that the government would legislate away an industry so that they don't have to "parent."
So I asked:
I think the tobacco industry is an obvious industry to make reference to. I think now days most people who don't smoke would be happy to see it regulated away and I think it would be an extremely fringe position to think the tobacco industry should be able to advertise to kids today.> I'd be against most regulations that basically say "to protect the children, we will ban X for everyone". I'm sure there are exceptions though.
Just because we don't know the full extent of how bad Facebook is now, doesn't mean it isn't bad.
How bad do you think we thought smoking, opiates, or other problems were before we decided they were bad?
We saw the correlation with harm of tobacco, investigated more deeply, then regulated their wide spread use particularly use by children.
Facebook is modern day tobacco.
I am much less black and white about this than you might expect, because I am generally pro letting people do what they want with their bodies. After the age of 25 (when a person's prefrontal cortex is fully developed) there are few good arguments for preventing a net tax payer from doing what they want to their bodies or time. If someone can be told they are old enough to die (or kill) for their country, that's another factor that makes limiting their freedom to make bad decisions a hard argument.
> that the government might believe causes harm to children is quite unfortunate.
When you say "the government" that is entirely jaded. There is more nuance than us (the oppressed) and them (the government). Replace the government with "my fellow neighbors," and I think it harms the anti-government righteousness a bit.
The context of the original conversation was clearly not about banning Facebook, but about not being sad if they went away. Telling facebook it can't do business in utah if it serves children and Facebook deciding to not do any business in Utah as a result is not banning Facebook.
The USA government already makes the incorrect decision regarding these substances by criminalizing them, banning them, and throwing users in prison. Evidence shows that legalizing these substances and providing addiction care and universal healthcare, as well as tackling homelessness with empathetic solutions (literally just give them housing, it's that simple), is the so far most effective method to reduce usage of these substances.
Thus the highly retributive, reactionary USA government, or its local manifestations, can't be trusted to make these kinds of laws well.
Great, it banned tik tok for the kids. It passed a morality law. You know, fox news isn't really news, and some have suggested to that it provides a direct path to radicalization that leads to political violence. We should probably ban that, too. Don't worry, if you want to watch it, you can unlock it by applying at the local Office of Moral Wellbeing, just provide a photocopy of your photo ID and proof of address for them to file. That way if Fox changes channel registration, they have a list of all the people that watch it, so they can send someone to let you know the channel number changed.
TikTok is a national security issue and a reciprocity issue and for that reason it was a bad choice of example.
You can look at other social media as a morality problem. I could see why someone would think of it that way, but we are literally quite governed by our neurotransmitters, and these companies literally have "engagement" (read: addiction) engineers. There are literally addiction engineers working on creating the state of addiction. Engineers working on figuring out how to get people to spend the maximum amount of time possible on the apps.
At some point it becomes a health issue. Stimulus is stimulus. Dopamine dysfunction is real.
What's the difference between scrolling an infinite feed for 10 hours and feeling good on an opium den couch for 10 hours? I am not saying that's a perfect comparison, but I don't think it's as simple as morality. These social media apps cause real biological response and there are engineers literally working on manipulating those responses.
The solution for all three I think is the same. Don't allow the government to pass laws criminalizing these things, because that has bad outcomes. It's a lot easier to say "the government isn't allowed to restrict bodily autonomy" than it is to for example try to write into law the 800 different specific exact scenarios where society thinks abortion is ok. In this case, "the government isn't allowed to pass laws restricting access to information" or something along those lines.
Certainly we should allow our government to offer alternatives, information on the negative effects of a toxin, treatments, and use our governments to ensure good social safety nets that prevent people falling into toxin abuse as their only escape.
I'm talking about the problems of using the State to enforce whatever given values or ideals. The State is at best completely imperfect, at worst, it's fascist and trying to kill you and people like you. Don't let it get to that point, don't let it ban what it today defines as "social media."
There are better ways to protect society from these harmful things. Mostly I think solutions around good public education.
I don't know what to do, but I do think social media is becoming a cancer, and I do think we need treatment. I don't now what the treatment is.
I think you're saying the treatment can be worse than the disease, and I agree.
> I'm talking about the problems of using the State to enforce whatever given values or ideals.
I think we probably agree on a lot politically, but this is where I think I take a hard turn.
Somewhere bad faith behavior must be discouraged. Education is one place that happens, the legal system is another place. Education is only a first line defense against bad faith.
In the game theory of daily life, defectors and defection cannot be a winning strategy otherwise society will turn from a high trust society into a low trust society. Consensus will be abandoned in favor of dominance. To be honest, I think we are already to that point.
Human rights are an example of an ideal that the state must enforce. Contractual obligations are an ideal a state must enforce. Rule of law is an ideal that a state must enforce. Property rights are an ideal states must enforce.
Where it becomes less clear is the Fox News case you stated because Fox News is actively trying to destroy the idea of rule of law.
I don't know how to deal with that.
Do you think that's a problem? Should nothing be done?
Basically yes.
> Where it becomes less clear is the Fox News case you stated because Fox News is actively trying to destroy the idea of rule of law.
I only use the Fox news example as a wake up call to conservatives cackling gleefully as the government of Ohio shutting down access to a social media platform.
Actually the core of my fear revolves around that: the American government at all levels, in any state, is highly reactionary, and I'm afraid of it using its newly discovered power to get away with this sort of thing to start banning communication among leftists. Or, something I think it will try in the next two years, banning communication among LGBT people.
Well, I guess this is where I wish communities had more power to organize their own protections and arrangements. Imagine if one town wanted to ban fox news for example, the USA government would probably step in and enforce a lawsuit against them. It seems the power dynamics are out of wack.
Ok, this would be opposite: I want absolute access to my 17 years old kids account. I want read all their messages with their friends and I do not want them to have any privacy, because I want to fully control them.
Second part of the opposite: I dont want to talk with my kids about social dynamic in their peer group. I do not want to talk with them about beauty standards, realistic or not. I do not want to help them navigate peer relationships and I do not care about my kids thoughts. My idea of solving these issues is to cut their access to communication methods.
I am not about to defend either.
> What are your thoughts on pharmaceutical/heroin legislation?
I am actually fine with whole bunch of regulations and law. Really, this dichotomy where if you dont like one law you need to hate all of them is ridiculous. It
So I’m more of a fan of seeing that. Not the actual outcome.
Would make more people choose more collaborative solutions faster.
Ironically posted on a social media site (Hacker News has the characteristics of "Social Media Site" under this definition).
Reddit would also be gone.
It's funny to read all the comments from people who think "social media" just means "sites I don't like"
Is there? Is there to your 80 year old senator and their constituents that think the internet is a series of tubes. You know, the constituents that actually vote?
Does it matter how well you explain it anyway? Modern political language lacks definition by design. Do street interviews and ask Americans what socialism is. Then ask them what they'd call the government giving banks money. Then ask them how many times in the last 20 years the government has given banks money.
My argument is that we should just not let the governments pass these kinds of laws because it opens the door to using these laws to arbitrarily block whatever website they can vaguely hand wave as "social media" or whatever they pick.
They don't, especially when they're throwing their weight around after screaming about internet boogeymen for years.
Go watch the Tiktok hearings. They were losing their minds because filters could track your eyes and your cell phone could use the internal wifi network in order to access the internet.
Don't threaten me with a good time.
If it's banned for every child equally, they will have to meet up irl or call each other like in the 80s or whatever. Whatever the alternative, it shifts the dynamic and doesn't isolate your child.
Regulations for kids is not simply about bad parenting but can be about prisoner's dilemma-like situations where everyone needs to work together for a good outcome and, unless a decent percentage gets on board at more or less the same time, it's counterproductive for individuals.
I lived there for a few years in college and while I’m somewhat surprised the law passed, I’m not that surprised.
It's baffling to read all the HN comments encouraging draconian restrictions and forced PII collection on websites, all with the assumption that it will only apply to websites I don't like.
Laws like this, if enforced, would make a lot of the sites you use on a daily basis require strict ID verification. Are you really ready to be doing the ID verification dance with GitHub, Reddit, Hacker News and every other big site on the internet just to post?
Of course not. You're going to sign up for a VPN and use it, just like all of the 17 year old kids who just want to use the internet like normal people.
- Chilling effect on political discussions. Good luck campaigning to overturn these laws if you can't do so without fear of reprisal from government officials or your local community.
- Limiting the ability for marginalized groups to seek support; LGBTQ youth, ex-mormons, etc., would be directly harmed by this.
Because right now you can be anonymous/pseudonymous? Of course people will try to unmask you, but I'm contrasting it in a world where you can't even attempt it.
Thank you for your time.
Though it is nice to allow various beliefs, it is more important to have a cohesive community, even if it means sacrificing some personal beliefs. Personal values should line up with community values. If they are in contradiction, an open discussion should be had to realign them.
The time to push back is now, before we give them this power.
As an aside, I lived in Utah for many years and I generally thought people preferred to not have the government dictating what was allowed and not allowed.
You not wanting to explain something to your kids and enforce limits based on said explanations isn't a reason to make a law.
Paradoxically, TikTok and Instagram could pass in a limited form. What is targeted is communication between people, mindless consumption is fine by that law.
> Utah has become the first US state to require social media firms get parental consent for children to use their apps and verify users are at least 18.
> The bills also impose a social media curfew that blocks children's access between 22:30 and 06:30, unless adjusted by their parents.
So there would very much be something you could do about it, and your kids would find out.
You're still the quote-unquote bad guys. You still have to, gasp, parent.
It's also quite possible that this law gets thrown out as unconstitutional by the federal courts since it seems similar to the California video game censorship law from Brown v. EMA.
That’s the idea actually.
They made us wear masks due to a threat to our physical health. Social media is currently having extremely acute effects on the mental health of a generation. It may have reached the point that losing anonymity and requiring ID is better than suicides and depression. At this point, if you look at the numbers, it’s like claiming the government is infringing your rights to buy alcohol anonymously. We should stop pretending that mental health damage is of lower priority than physical health.
(And don’t get me started about the parents - outside of SV, only a few percent even know parental controls exist, let alone how to use them effectively without loopholes.)
I wouldn't say that anonymity is the problem here, but rather that social media sites are crafted to abuse the psychology of their users for attention, engagement, ad impressions etc.
It isn't a given that social media has to make teens depressed. If the psychologists and researchers that are hired by these companies to hone in on engagement were instead were paid to make their platforms less psychologically harmful, we could see better results. Hell, platforms have the potential to improve people's lives if they were optimized for those outcomes. Civil and criminal liability could be introduced to social media operators to ensure that their products aren't causing harm, as well.
Incentives to achieve those results can come from legislation and the judicial system.
This has been a claim for a long time. Esp with self esteem and teen mags or the beauty industry. Unfortunately, social media is the greatest prison people created for themself.
> losing anonymity and requiring ID is better than suicides and depression
Mr gjsman-1000, is this a reasonable claim? SM that advocates free discussion in a mostly anonymous forum [HN].. is that causing the issue that we're discussing? [My stance is engagement oriented industries are causing this at the benefit of profit]
> outside of SV, only a few percent even know parental controls exist, let alone how to use them effectively without loopholes.
This sounds like a great acknowledgement of a problem that can be fixed.
Funny how people care about youth suicide only when it is about making controlling laws they want.
Somehow, there is zero interest in teen girls as persons - all I see on HN is tons of contempt towards them, again and again. Somehow, boys suicides dont matter at all despite being higher. Somehow, boys mental health issues matter only when you can use it as talking point against feminists (boys are depressed? must be because girls are allowed to refuse the sex).
Stop pretending you heart is breaking.
What else do you expect? When tech companies make phones secure enough for the NSA, every app has passwords, and most apps have disappearing messages, how exactly do you expect parents to monitor what their kids are doing?
All the "parental monitoring" apps do is check how much time kids are using the phone. They give zero info on what the kids are actually doing.
So tell me, you want to put the onus on the parents? OK, then require any app used by kids to make all messages available to parents, and forbid disappearing messages.
You don't want to do that? Well, then don't say: "parents you watch them".
You can't simultaneously make something someone else's responsibility, and also make it impossible for them to do it.
I guess the argument would be technology enables children to do secret stuff without any of the obvious signs, like sneaking out in the middle of the night?
> I guess the argument would be technology enables children to do secret stuff without any of the obvious signs, like sneaking out in the middle of the night?
Yes, it was rather obvious when a teen was behaving secretive, or there were middle of the night calls.
Privacy is important, but if your teen was suddenly displaying secretive behavior you could tell.
They also lost some control, if you lived in ideologically segregated community, kids had no way to learn about ideas from outside. That was destroyed by internet. Your Utah Mormon kid can read pre LBGT materials now.
Try it if you don't believe me. You can't even ride the bus without a phone because bus stops no longer display schedules and routes.
Want to go trampoline jumping? It's impossible without a phone because they want you to sign a waver in advance using your phone.
Pay Phones are no longer a thing. The "phone behind the counter" in restaurants and shops is no longer a thing.
Even grade school children are staring to have trouble navigating the world without a phone.
And if that means no startup can possibly compete against the existing players in the industry that have the bandwidth and resources to implement the regulation?
They want "the old internet" back, whatever it means. Of course it means no more startup. Startups change things and we don't want that! We want the exact internet from 1998.
When I was 13 I was playing CS 1.6 on dedicated servers with a small number of strangers that were like 30, I was also on I don't even know how many random forums with small numbers of users.
It's like a 13 year old hanging out at some random adult's house vs walking around a mall.
I can't see how a bill limiting access to websites with more than 5M users is going to reduce paedophilia.
I think starting a tech startup under a VC model is a high-risk, high-reward setup and that your idea should be strong enough to withstand regulations such as this, yeah. There has been a lot of false innovation lately and it has soured my view on the model.
I think it also hurts the incumbents, even though they get a moat of sorts. But only a moat around "tracking teenagers for advertising data".
Should we remove content filters on YouTube and ask parents to filter content instead?
This wasn't mentioned in the debate over the bill (only it being marketed as some "common sense" bipartisan initiative), but I strongly suspect it benefited from the culture war over queer kids, and they will be disproportionately harmed by this.
One thing worth mentioning is that it only affects platforms with >5M users, and many of the resources I used back then were garage-run websites with much fewer users. I'm kind of mixed on this because I do believe major platforms are better equipped to handle abuse reports than rinky-dink forums. But on the flip side, said rinky-dink forums weren't constantly manipulating you for attention.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
This is not the internet I want to participate in. It's freaking scary that the government is associating your ability to freely access information based on your class and standing. Why we have weak journalists and activists who aren't making a shitfit over it is just mind-boggling.
Subcomment: I do believe that social media has caused harm, however the negative reprocutions on how they're going about it does not seem like a good intention.
I see no reason why society should not extend ID requirements to certain times of night.
At the same time I'm not really a fan of the implementation being based on providing real identity for a hard age cutoff. Maybe I'm 20 years old and don't want my real identity to be tied to the social identity for privacy/coming out/political/other reasons as personal info uploaded seems to always get leaked. Maybe I'm 17 years old and having the same restrictions as a 7 year old that will disappear instantly in 3 months doesn't make any sense and I never had good chances to learn to make good choices on my own accord while I had the strongest support structures I'll have all my life available. Maybe I'm worried this is part of a slippery slope for all, as the ages keep rising on this type of legislation over time.
Overall I'd much rather put the tools (like curfew support or removal of targeted advertisements) in the hands of people and argue why they should want to use them. Similarly, with the tools made available, I'd rather trust parents are able to learn to raise their kid on this matter as they have every other matter so if kids are found to be working around curfews set by parents we don't need the government to step in. If one argues too many parents can't then I'm sorry to say you've done a horrible job convincing anyone what you think is good is actually so and relying on unpopular law creates more problems than it solves.
Alternatively I'd at least like a solution where the associated age verification identification is unrelated to your real identity (e.g. a one time proof at the DMV when you're getting your first 18+ license that gives you some identity token which identifies you as 18+ but does nothing else and is not stored or mapped with your real identity otherwise). It doesn't solve a lot of the blind application problems (and still lacks guarantee limitations you want to follow you into adulthood, if you so choose, can) but at least it prevents one class of issues.
It may sound like I fit in the small government camp for everything but I'd say I'm fine with government getting involved with what corporations can do a lot more often than when people are involved. Overall it also depends on the issue and the alternative outcomes with implementation. I guess what I'm saying is don't generalize because I argue for small government here I also argue for it in every case all the time, even if it is about people. There are some things I think it's great to centrally legislate but content consumption is one I don't think the benefits outweigh the costs on. It's certainly the most direct and probably has the largest impact but "we've waited so long to do anything about it that the problem to become really big" is a horrible reason to pick direct and largest impact approaches.
I too am in full support of zero trust tokens. However, I feel like society doesn't understand and would never support this. Corporations have no punishment for collecting and abusing people's information, that it's disgusting. Even when they're caught abusing it, theres no negative repercussions for the organizations. (Experian.. which should have been completely closed.. got a minor fine to continue leaking people's info)
Another point I wanted to make for you. I want to see anonymous identity tokens as that we're continuing on this path. For example: Hetzner is now requiring biometrics + id proof of who you are to pay them money for a server. I understand they want to avoid fraud and provide services to legitimate people, but that kind of info is insane to give to some random person at some corporation.
1. Acknowledge the problem
2. Seek a root cause
3. Attempt to mediate this issue at it's root. My uninformed, and unasked for, opinion on this is this is due to the adjustment of living situation and social expectations of that age group pushes their developing social environment to go global rather than staying local. (People are scared of their kids in the local community hanging out and social, where they've been stuck in doors playing xbox/tiktok).
4. In doing #4 attempt to mediate this issue with the parents. Don't try to punish people in the situation, provide acceptable alternatives to help people be better.
On a surface level:
1. Demonstrate in public a way that live without social media is a workable thing for people at that age
2. Provide mental health outreach for the effected people (This costs money so it's never done)
From what I did find, they are required to keep that info for at least 7 days. As a Chicagoian, required tracking of how much and where I drink at is super concerning.
https://www.abc4.com/news/top-stories/why-is-the-bouncer-sca...
Papers please. Want to speak and assemble online? I'm gonna need to see some papers first.
The governor's tweet is: https://twitter.com/GovCox/status/1639015949964840960
> SB152 requires social media companies to verify that users in the state are 18 or older to open an account. Minors will need parental consent to create an account.
Ok, so what age verification does SB152 require? https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/static/SB0152.html
> 246 (3) (a) Beginning March 1, 2024, a social media company shall verify the age of an > 247 existing or new Utah account holder and, if the existing or new account holder is a minor, > 248 confirm that a minor has consent as required under Subsection (1):
They totally punt on the issue of how you determine if an account is a minor:
> 256 (4) In accordance with Title 63G, Chapter 3, Utah Administrative Rulemaking Act, the > 257 division, with consideration of stakeholder input, shall make rules to: > 258 (a) establish processes or means by which a social media company may meet the age > 259 verification requirements of this chapter; > 260 (b) establish acceptable forms or methods of identification, which may not be limited > 261 to a valid identification card issued by a government entity; > 262 (c) establish requirements for providing confirmation of the receipt of any information > 263 provided by a person seeking to verify age under this chapter;
It is not remotely clear how you are supposed to enforce this without requiring government id for all users. Or at least, Utah users.
How the bill defines social media:
10) (a) "Social media platform" means an online forum that a social media company 160 makes available for an account holder to: 161 (i) create a profile; 162 (ii) upload posts; 163 (iii) view the posts of other account holders; and 164 (iv) interact with other account holders or users.
There’s exceptions for email, Netflix, Amazon, news, traditional media kinds of sites.
https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/static/HB0311.html
It gives power and eyeballs back to the entrenched traditional media moguls.
I think it says a lot about any politician that pushes for laws that are meant to be selectively enforced.
Picture a GitHub.io site that hosts images of nude art.
It’ll be enforced against whoever individual citizens decide to enforce it against; its a purely private right of action.
Conservatives have discovered that the constitution only binds the state, so if they delegate enforcement to private lawsuits they can completely bypass protections.
Edit: see https://theintercept.com/2023/03/24/texas-bounty-hunter-drag... and https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-abortion-law-bounty-hunte...
This is fascism. that's it
Discord in particular has become known as “groomercord” for it’s open pedophilia.
17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsh*t, for the same reasons I would now. (So does dad me, incidentally. My kid's messages have always been her business, not mine.)
I was making PRs to oss projects on Github and churning through Project Euler by 15.
I literally owe my entire career to SO which is weird to say typing it out now.
Yes, I do realize I now sound like I just said "back in my day, we walked to school, uphill both ways".
Old man yells at cloud, but kids these day won't even have to look at code, everything will be filtered through natural language.
When I learned my second programming language (JavaScript), I asked most of my questions via a mailing list. It's quite weird trying to recall it... I almost forgot how mailing list work today.
I don’t believe they even allow under-13 today due to COPA laws.
Of course this focus on the age 13 is completely missing the point that the actual age gate is 17.
I'd suggest that teens in Utah just use a VPN but social media sites have been cracking down on VPN users for years and many of those sites now require phone number verification to sign up. This law illustrates yet another reason why that's a bad idea.
COPPA. COPA was the second attempt (after CDA, which was the first), COPPA was the third and the one that stuck.
But would the site let you sign up if even with parental permission if it had to do additional identification verification to identify that the permission was from your parent, and was liable for (1) actual damages if you got addicted [0] because of some element of their site design, and (2) huge ($250,000 per feature) penalties if they also didn’t do quarterly audits to identify, and within 30 days after identification eliminate, any feature which might addict you?
How many programming sites see minors in general, much less Utah minors specifically, as that important to their mission to take on the extra costs and risks this bill imposes on serving that population?
[0] Using an intentionally broad definition of addiction
For Github? 10(b)(i)(N), to the extent that source code files are “documents”.
For Stack Overflow? 10(b)(i)(J), which was probably written for LinkedIn specifically.
See also: survivorship bias.
I'm sure many of us didn't have any access to StackOverflow and GitHub when we were around 17 years old, because StackOverflow and GitHub didn't exist yet. For several of us, git didn't exist yet. Heck, for some of us, the web didn't exist yet!
Kids these days...
It’s basically force-fed opinions at a global scale, how can that possibly be healthy? We can barely fathom how this media impacts adults as it stands. All this clear evidence aside, I feel like it’s obvious, how can the absence of these things do any measurable harm to kids?
As a parent do you not already have all the tools you need to ensure your children don't use tik Tok? From the light touch and mundane, using the built in features of the operating system (parental blockers and app timers are available on Android and IOS) to the heavy touch of not allowing your kid to have a smartphone.
Why do you want the government taking over this role for you? Maybe there's some parents who don't care if their children are on tik tok. Why should they follow the same parental strategy you have?
There are three general categories of parents on this, and to be clear, I don’t think any of these are bad parents: 1. Those who are extremely weary and tech savvy, like myself 2. Those who are weary but have no earthly idea how to set up these controls effectively. 3. Those who don’t give a f*all about it at all.
I tend to believe it’s just as bad but it’s about as misunderstood as tobacco used to be. The industry KNOWS it’s bad for kids, it’s been proven bad for kids but it’s peddled to them anyway.
All that aside, let’s just say hypothetically I wanted to manage this all myself and wanted the government out of it, sounds good in theory. The tooling around limiting inappropriate content is mind-blowingly inadequate. At the very least this should be mandatory and more concretely standardized. I’m not flatly against giving kids some access to it but it’s reached a point where my kids can’t even do their homework at all without full access to all of Youtube which by itself has loads of content not remotely appropriate for elementary school kids. Youtube kids is a joke.
It’s pretty frustrating as a parent to manage content restrictions for the 3-4 major browsers, search engines, youtube, messenging apps, iphones, macbook, windows app store, and so on. This could be a full time job. Then, the kids bring home a school provided chromebook or login to chrome with a school account which has no content restrictions at all and I have zero control over anyway. Honestly, parental controls in the current state is largely a waste of time.
I also think state sponsored content moderation should be used to restrict access to harmful online media as opposed to lumbering this task on individuals. As you've mentioned, some parents need this enforced upon them.
If we were talking about vaping, which is still highly unregulated and available for children to buy, I'm sure the majority would be in agreement about age restrictions. The fact that we're talking about preventing psychological addiction and trauma makes it harder for people to agree on the harmful effects of this type of content. It's simply not as visible as the huge plumes of oil-steam breathed out by every 12 year old in a bus stop these days.
However, I don't agree with the implementation of content moderation proposed by Utah state. It's totally unworkable and poorly thought through.
If you want to protect your kids from these things then you need to educate them and get them to enforce the rules themselves.
Case in point being that here in the UK it is illegal to market tobacco products at all (including to adults in this case). This also applies to politicians, prescriptions medicine and a bunch of other things. And IMO it’s often a good compromise that allows for harm reduction without outright banning something.
Maybe what we should focus on is more standardization, effectiveness of controls and requiring these trillion dollar companies to build parents one single pane of glass to monitor and control content for all platforms. May not even be feasible but it really just sounds like another engineering challenge that requires a major investment to get it done.
In the 90's most teens already had access to a primitive internet where they could chat with anyone in the world using BBS[1], which was not too different from a modern social network. Email was already a thing as well for some time, but probably became widespread at this time... by the late 90's the internet was already quite similar to today for geeks, except perhaps videos (and even high resolution pics) were not a thing due to the low speed of the net.
StackOverflow and GitHub only came around in the late 2000's, which is basically yesterday. Before them, there were similar sites as well (the infamous expertsexchange for SO, and SourceFourge for GH, for example) for quite some time, but they surely became very dominant in their areas.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
As a side note, my first intern job was to make a localized ripoff of SO (within a team, of course). It was still a relatively shining new thing by the time.
We understood it. Not sure why you think we didn't.
Haha...I learned when the web was mainly AOL. MSN at the time had pretty good forums which helped a lot. But the main place I was learning programming from was books, but they were expensive - especially for a college kid. When I would run into problems I couldn't solve I would head to the book store with a pencil and paper and copy bits and pieces that I hoped would help. Then head back home and try again (talk about a long debug run loop). Luckily this was around the same time of the rise of big bookstores where they encouraged hanging out so no one ever questioned me.
I probably wouldn't be a programmer without sourceforge.
Before StackOverflow it was PAINFUL. Staring at "Reached end of file while parsing" errors and wondering wtf that even means...
Then finding out after 5 hours that you missed a semicolon.
Oh, and forget rounded borders, what a f@#%king nightmare.
If anyone thinks that this bill is going to keep 17 year olds from accessing everything from Reddit to GitHub, they are going to be very disappointed.
It's kind of wild to see so much of these comments insisting that anyone under the age of 18 be locked up and prevented from accessing basic internet sites and* encouraging laws that would force every site to implement strict ID verification just to use it.
Did everyone just forget what it was like to grow up with draconian content blockers at school preventing you from getting to benign information on the internet?
most school content blockers were pretty easily bypassed in my experience. i was in school relatively recently, my highschool had fortinet which sucked (sni blocking + blocks a bunch of protocols), but tor still got through if i used a bridge. i probably could've used a vpn but tor was easier. before highschool there wasn't anything more than dns filtering (and briefly http host blocking but not sni blocking) which was bypassed by approximately everyone (who wanted to bypass it). most people used random vpn apps, i changed dns, both worked fine.
This is such a hilariously bad take. No wonder kids are so screwed up with parents having an attitude like that.
Hacker News had a good run. I'm going to miss it when it's decided that tracking enough PII on its users to be compliant with this law (and the ones that will follow) is more trouble than it's worth to Y-Combinator, but so it goes.
The open forum era was a grand experiment, and the experiment is winding down.
Ends up being this weird blend of "disturbing kid crack" videos that you really shouldn't leave a child unattended with. The whole "Peppa Pig Drinks Bleach" stuff was only the shallow end of the darkness of the stuff generally tossed in the "Elsagate" category.
There is no "safe" way for a... oh, 2-7 year old, I'll be nice, to use the internet unattended. I've seen an awful lot of it out and about.
At least we're teaching kids the basics of computer security by forcing them to circumvent these restrictions, and I have full faith than they will. Most kids are much more technologically literate than someone who would unironically type "groomercord".
Nobody without sufficient brain-rot (ironically likely caused by social media) would call it that.
I dunno where you're finding all this discord pedophilia, is this a self-report?
https://m.youtube.com/@CPCatcher
It’d be sad if all them got run off because of hysteria about them being “groomed”.
Whether the consequences are intentional or not is still to be determined.
155 (9) "Social media company" means a person or entity that: 156 (a) provides a social media platform that has at least 5,000,000 account holders 157 worldwide; and 158 (b) is an interactive computer service.
So, size is really the only relevant discriminator.
No, its not, see the vast horde of use/function based exclusions starting at line 165 comprising code section 13-63-101(10)(b).
I disagree, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35310413 (especially considering that because this law creates a penalty, and because it restricts speech, its definitions of the covered parties and conduct must be read narrowly – and its exceptions read broadly [0] – per the rule of lenity in statutory construction.)
[0] if, in the first instance, it is Constitutional at all.
The fact that there are 20 categories of services exempted shows that this is a terrible bill that is based on punishing specific actors and not regulating data privacy or child wellbeing in a meaningful way.
for reference, line 165 to 224 of that link are the exceptions:
"Social media platform" does not include an online service, website, or application: (i) where the predominant or exclusive function is:
(J) is a carve-out for linkedin, wonderful.EDIT: serious question; would Slack be professional networking or, how does that work under this bill? It's DMing for business, but it isn't really networking.
Nothing in the law restricts to DMs being between two people, it just distinguishes them from public content.
> (I) shared between the sender and the recipient; 171 (II) only visible to the sender and the recipient; and 172 (III) are not posted publicly;
maybe sender and recipient can be considered a group chat with multiple recipients? Otherwise you wouldn't classify something like Kik or Discord as social media.
edit: This is false as of 22 Feb, when Facebook Jobs was discontinued. I didn't realize.
I’m not opposed to the idea of whitelisting healthy online activities and limiting anything else. They could go further and whitelist sites like HN, arch forums etc where it’s educational
Sibling comment mentioned how group chats aren’t exempted. I’ve seen group chats get very unhealthy before. 2 is low, maybe 5 or 8 participants max would be ok.
So Roblox, arguably quite harmful to children, is specifically carved out. That's great.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/religion/nearly-1-700-priests-c...
> Nearly 1,700 priests and other clergy members that the Roman Catholic Church considers credibly accused of child sexual abuse are living under the radar with little to no oversight from religious authorities or law enforcement, decades after the first wave of the church abuse scandal roiled U.S. dioceses, an Associated Press investigation has found.
> These priests, deacons, monks and lay people now teach middle-school math. They counsel survivors of sexual assault. They work as nurses and volunteer at nonprofits aimed at helping at-risk kids. They live next to playgrounds and daycare centers. They foster and care for children.
> And in their time since leaving the church, dozens have committed crimes, including sexual assault and possessing child pornography, the AP’s analysis found.
Unfettered social interaction with other participants in an unmonitored environment that superficially 'looks' like a video game. This social interaction leads to bullshit purchases. Not purchasing the bullshit leads to peer pressure and bullying.
Is it a technical problem? is it lack of content moderation? or do social networks that are catered towards children simply lead to a toxic environment? I can't say if it's more one or the other, which makes it a challenge to try and fix.
He also learned most countries, their capitals, and their flags. And that was just a few servers with "country balls".
I find the YouTube videos involving those far more insidious, because children don't really understand biting sarcasm and satire as well as adults, and I'll often make him switch videos.
But I haven't noticed anything necessarily harmful about Roblox.
Then again, don't they make like a billion dollars a year?
I'm more upset that they screw content creators so badly that the "bullying and peer pressure" seems to be necessary.
Roblox is one of those things that seems impossible on a technical level. And with a billion dollars, they could hire social workers, moderators, etc.
Almost every single game is a front for purchases, and those that aren’t are barely games at all. Many Minecraft mods are one time purchases that are way, way better than anything Roblox produces, but Minecraft is so buggy that it’s truly not suitable for kids, or anyone for that matter. Minecraft will continuously corrupt saves, so you need to fully reinstall the game, and log out of your Xbox/MS account and fail to authorize.
I grew up on counterstrike and StarCraft mods, and there is nothing available today that fills the same role. I’ve played chess implemented in StarCraft, DOTA before it was standalone, and zombies maps that wouldn’t be brought to other shooters for years ahead of time.
My kids aren’t allowed to play games I wouldn’t play. The list of actual-games-that-arent-ads is huge, and there is no need to let in Roblox.
>My kids aren’t allowed to play games I wouldn’t play.
Nothing says 'hacker mindset' like your parents deciding for you what games you should and shouldn't like.
It is a frightening thought though to think — am I more conservative than my parents?
Freemium games make sure there's enough "there" there to keep casuals almost happy. The trick is to make the $5 and $10 premium purchases let you do around 4-12 hours of gameplay advancement, but that's it. Consider something like Shop heroes (or whatever) where you can put thousands of hours into the game for free, a day or two "skip" for $10 isn't a good value proposition. But skipping a week or a month? maybe after someone has put $10 in a few or several times and gotten that little jolt they want to feel the big jolt of a lot of money.
I know i spent around $100 in the blizzard RMAH (Real Money Auction House) on diablo III and it netted me nothing - nothing at all. So i learned my lesson real quick. Real money for virtual goods is a non-starter.
Now as far as robux goes, I want my child to understand that it's ok to pay people for their work (designing the levels, making items/skins). So he can choose to spend his money on hotwheels, paints, robux, google giftcards, whatever, $5 at a time. I do sometimes make a frowny face when he chooses robux, though; because as i said, a billion dollars!
Games explicitly banned: Roblox, for ads and IAP
Minecraft, because the second time I had to reinstall it on a ps5 to fix a corrupted installation was too much.
Any game by gameloft, etc. If it has a purchase price it’s probably fine. I also don’t let my young kids watch game of thrones.
That one change would make Robolox a terrible game based on how you described it. Isn't that problem solved without the need for a complex law full of arbitrary definitions and one-off carve outs?
> Minecraft is so buggy that it’s truly not suitable for kids, or anyone for that matter.
> Minecraft will continuously corrupt saves you need to fully reinstall the game
I don't recognize the game you are describing. I've never heard of a paid minecraft mod, they're all free. Buggy? It has some odd in-game behavior that you could reasonably call bugs, but the only crashes I've ever gotten were during modding, caused by incompatible or low quality mods. Corrupting saves? I've never experienced it, nor can I imagine how a corrupted save would be addressed by reinstalling the game. What is the supposed connection between a save file being corrupted and needing to reinstall the entire game?
You've obviously got some strange prejudices about this game which simply don't resemble reality.
There's a game engine/a large variety of games combined with a common community. The games can be silly, but they're silly with other people who recognize they're silly, and others who aren't in on the joke yet
Was there peer pressure and potential for bullying based on what others had? Absolutely. Should a state have intervened with a required mandatory dress code and government-approved backpack? Hell no, there's always going to be peer pressure and bullying no matter how oppressive laws become.
Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers - https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ
Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. - https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY
AKA forums and memes.
Is that a fair analysis?
[edit] : per privacy advocates - no, I don't think it's okay to start with a law that bans everything and carve out exceptions; obviously, that way lies totalitarianism. I'm just trying to get a handle on the immediate intent. There's a boolean at work here. I guess someone was like, "hey, why chip away at forums and meme sites when we can just ban everything in theory, let most of it slide, and work back toward totalitarianism from there with the law already in place?"
[edit2] HN appears to be totally banhammered under this since /the mods/ don't post the news.
Does HN have more than 5 million user accounts?
The 90s Era gun ban that Biden was so proud of is a perfect example. They had to include so many caveats and arbitrary descriptions of what makes a gun an "assault rifle" that manufacturers just dodged the rules with tweaked rifle designs. Something as small as a thumb hole in the grip made a gun legal because of how specific the law had to be.
In this case, what stops a social media company from coming up with some business model where a child company is spun up for every 4.9m users? You could argue its more like Mastodon, a decentralized network that just happens to use the same proprietary protocol, app, and is owned by the same parent Corp.
> based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something
> law : depending on individual discretion (as of a judge) and not fixed by law
A law itself fits the first definition. At best, a law is written by a tiny minority of the population but with the intent of best reflecting the majority opinion or preference.
I'd be really interested to hear an example of a law that is based on necessity or intrinsic nature, though maybe there are a few!
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arbitrary
My experience regulating my daughters internet access is that interactions with other kids have the highest potential for toxicity.
They seem ok with kids passively consuming a stream of adult generated content.
They’re also excluding SaaS which just emulates desktop software.
I think that’s about right.
Let's also not mention how the only way to reliably do this is to require identity verification from all adults. Get ready to scan your drivers license to post on hacker news and every other site (except traditional news sites apparently).
Doesn't this loophole even defeat their own hidden agenda? Almost every online game today features a chat function.
content that is generated by an account holder, or uploaded to or shared on the 270 platform by an account holder, that may be encountered by another account holder;
This is how privacy died. Someone fought for everything. Compromised for everything but twenty. Nobody supported the fight.
Then, when the deal was announced, out came the pitchforks for perfection.
[1] https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/872/billtext/html/HB00020F...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_House_Bill_20
Making laws that cover millions of people is way too complex for something so detailed. There's no way around that complexity leading to a pile of garbage legal mumbo-jumbo as they realize it's nearly impossible to draw a neat line around the problem.
edit: This is false as of 22 Feb, when Facebook Jobs was discontinued. I didn't realize.
This is the area that gets grey. If the provide applies any filter or AI judgement it becomes preselected. This applies to tiktok, facebook, youtube and ig.
This law bans old school forums and reddit but not if results are displayed by "best match"
It would be utterly fascinating if LinkedIn became Utah's de facto LGBTQ online space.
Can a site without discrete named accounts, where everyone is called 'Anonymous', claim that there's no way to verify whether the content is generated by humans? It's basically the 4chan model.
The law defines 'social media platform' in terms of what account holders can do, and 'social media company' in terms of the number of account holders.
It really goes out of its way to distinguish 'users' and 'account holders', and if there are no account holders, it’s not social media. Apparently.
There's an edgy 12 year old somewhere in my head cackling and gleefully shouting 'Let the good times roll!'
It's not the endless wars.
It's not the endless poverty.
It's not the endless divisiveness.
It's not the endless media fearmongering of X or Y.
It's TikTok. It's Instagram. Etc.
If you think "Oh I'll just watch youtube to get an idea of what other people are watching", you're stuck in 20th century thinking. It doesn't work like that anymore, youtube/etc are fundamentally unlike old media. These systems have atomized society in a way that newspapers never could.
Just because adults have normalized the baggage of negativity and lack of progress doesn't mean the kids aren't feeling beyond the lies. FFS, any reasonable adult should be feeling pain and distraught at this point.
p.s. I forgot to mention climate change / environmental damage. Imagine being young and thinking "someday this shit-show will be mine." It's foolish and naive to blame SM for this.
But I also don't think my teenagers are nearly as concerned about climate change and the world they are inheriting as they are living up to the life social media says they should have and feeling inadequate being unable to attain it.
The children of North America have by in large not experienced war themselves in well over a century, with cartel violence being the standout counterexample of sorts. More lost parents to wars, but the Vietnam War was now a few generations ago and the "wars on terror" effected only tens thousands of North American families in this way, counting all casualties not just fatalities. Tens of thousands sounds like a lot but this country has hundreds of millions of people, so you can hardly explain broad social trends with this.
So how else might wars be effecting children in North America? Well for one, children may become depressed after watching tons of graphic foreign war footage online... on social media.....
For those wondering if it'll affect your site/service, this only applies to social media companies that have > 5m account holders.
This is a Utah thing, with burgeoning consensus in a couple other states.
It’s confusing because they aren’t unified. I was a Democrat until 2015, when it felt like both sides had lost their mind and I voted libertarian. It seemed like there was no place for free speech advocates in the Democrat party anymore.
Eventually, my wife and I decided to become officially Republican when we realized that the Libertarians were totally ineffective as a party (the libertarian convention is literally just an excuse to have orgies and do drugs) and couldn’t fight back against the progressive ideology that we see as harmful towards successful child rearing, as well as us retaining a principled moral stance for free speech against the primarily leftist ideologies that had become so pervasive in social media circles. We feel like Elon Musk purchasing Twitter was one of the most important positive events of 2022, and a huge win for free speech.
There’s a lot of weird transition going on in the Republican Party because of this new group of “former Democrat refugees” who tend to be libertarian and free speech supporters are trying to integrate with the old guard republicans. We roll our eyes at this kind of stuff, but figure “it’s better than the crazy stuff going on these days on the other side”. Republican is turning into a much wider tent.
I'm having a hard time figuring out why you would expect to find one. The people who "vote conservative" do so for numerous different sorts of reasons, conservationism is not their root ideology, it is downstream of other disparate ideologies. A conservative voter who is Mormon has different motivations than a conservative voter who is a secular small business owner, and both have a different root ideology from an old school Catholic or an anti-communist Cuban-American.
Knowing this as I'm sure you do, why would you expect "conservatism", aka "voting for republicans", to be a consistent ideology? The people who do so were never all coming from the same ideological position in the first place.
Btw, the group of people who vote for democratic candidates also do so for a wide array of reasons, and don't all share much of a common and consistent ideology either. Welcome to the two-party system, in which innumerable ideologies get pigeonholed into two bins.
A: “But what about kids in abusive households that get cut off from communication”
B: “We have tools to ensure kids safety that requires actively using our social network already”
that’s a frustrating way of having a conversation
but yes, “opposing” is more accurate than opposite. people just seem to only have the mental capacity for two opposites
The main bill is a possibly a bit overreaching but I’m fully in favour of this part. There’s a huge problem where I live with kids just not going to school and many of those same kids are staying up until 1am each night doom scrolling or watching YouTube.
You realize you might be something of an outlier, right? Most teenagers are dramatically sleep-deprived, more so than teens of your generation. Your experience won't generalize.
> This law is just religious fundamentalist tradlife censorship dressed up in the moral panic of the moment.
Really?