I'm not sure the law enshrines a right for adults to have burden-free access to social media websites and apps. It would be fascinating to be proved wrong about that.
If you start fining the social media companies for breaking this law, this problem will be fixed quickly. Your demoralization propaganda is a line perpetuated by these companies to avoid responsibility
Yup. The actual solution here is regulation requiring social media and device manufacturers (networking and user devices like phones) to have simple, accessible, and robust parental controls.
The law proposed here is a stupid hammer that won't do anything but piss everyone off. Definitely what I've come to expect from my worthless state government (I live here, I'm sorry, ive tried to replace these people several times)
If teens are so so amazing at getting around restrictions why do you propose parental controls? No these companies should be responsible for not letting teens use their platform just as tobacco companies and those selling their products are responsible for not selling to teens. We already have parental controls and this is a do nothing solution which puts the onus on already overwhelmed parents and fixes literally nothing.
We’re looking for actual solutions here, not to check a box and pretend we tried
If they worked, a solid set of device parental controls would let the parent manage their kid's usage of social media without the privacy risks of doing effective age verification.
It'd be a privacy nightmare if everyone ended up sending all the major websites a copy of their passport/driving license to get access.
And policies like "tick box to confirm you're over 18" are a pointless joke.
You only have to disrupt them enough to make them useless to kids. There needs to be a critical mass of users for the social media tool to work. If some kids get through, fine. Liquor stores sell kids with fake IDs alcohol sometimes. But most kids won't be able to get access making the site more or less useless to those that can. Any large enough mass (someone at a school distributes to lots of people at the school) will likely be detected and destroyed.
I grew up as social media came into being(mid 2000s). When I was 13, I got Myspace. When I was 16, I got Facebook. It wasn't until well into college that I realized the impact social media had on my mental health. I would go further and say nobody until 18 should have social media, but that may be unrealistic in 2024.
I would sit on facebook, refreshing and doom scrolling endlessly. When fb messenger came out I was monitoring facebook messenger when it first came out to see who was online. I was always a pretty lonely kid, and I thought social media would connect me with people. It didn't really.
This reminds me of sitting around on AOL Instant Messenger, summer afternoons pre-2000.
Facebook came out when I was in college, and I resisted for one semester; then if felt "inevitable" [that I join] since almost all classmates were on thefacebook.
----
At present, I do not carry a cell phone nor use email [it is heavenly, a rare gift]. When somebody is more than ten minutes late for a planned meetup, I depart.
Setting it to 18 is obviously pretty ridiculous. That's just going to continue the weird trend of infantilizing people by pushing back the age at which they learn to deal with things that require self control.
At 16 there are at least 2 years where parents have the ability to actually interfere and help bring any negative effects under control.
Do you know at what age people are able to properly deal with things that require self control? I believe that part of the brain doesn’t mature until early 20s. At 18 a person is legally an adult so 18 seems like a much more reasonable cutoff than 16.
People don't just start being able to deal with things that require self control at a specific age. It has to be taught. Even sex ed recognizes that, where it's far more effective to teach kids how to be safe during it rather than to teach them that they can do what they want after 18.
If you push off the learning to when the person can legally just do whatever they want, all you're doing is abdicating parental responsibility and setting the person up for addiction as an adult.
Yes people should be taught skills to deal with making good choices and learning self control. But we don’t give kids heroin as part of the lesson in learning self control. The biological imperative for sex is overwhelming and there’s not much we can do to stop it. There is a way to stop companies from enticing kids with social media addiction though.
We would give them heroin in a controlled manner if the consumption of heroin was the primary means of social interaction for the majority of adults. The heroin analogy is eye catching, but ultimately nothing more than idiotic "think of the children"-esque hyperbole.
We agree that giving kids access to heroin as a way to teach self control is idiotic. What we don't agree on is that social media in its current incarnation is heroin like. I think it is.
..heroin was the primary means of social interaction for the majority of adults..
We aren't talking about adults we are talking about kids. That the majority of adults use social media for social interaction is a separate problem and in no way indicates that we should subject kids to something as highly addicting and harmful as social media (in its current incarnation).
There are tons of studies that show that social media harmful to peoples' mental health. It is profoundly dumb for society to subject kids to it. In same way it is profoundly dumb to let drug companies advertise. People are easily manipulated and kids especially so.
You're forgetting that my argument is that by pushing the age of access to social media up to 18 (as the person I replied to proposed), we'd be pushing teaching social media 'literacy' to when parents lose the tools they have to teach their kids. If an 18 year old gets debilitatingly addicted to social media, the most they can do is threaten to kick them out, which I'm sure you can agree isn't really a solution, but if say, a 16 year old does that, the parents can take away their phone and forcibly disconnect them in various ways until they find a healthier balance.
While social media is addictive and unhealthy, it is the primary means of social interaction among adults, thus, just as we introduce high schoolers to adult things like driving, sex, job interviews, citing other's work etc through partial exposure to such things (eg junior driving permits, sex ed, mock interviews or relaxed punishments for academic dishonesty), we should be teaching kids how to have a healthy relationship with social media through limited exposure BEFORE they turn 18.
To this extent, I prefer one of the other suggestions in this post, that there should be two 'tiers' of social media, kids should still be allowed to access small platforms, and in particular, forums. Those are easier to monitor for parents and lack many of the ills of more 'modern' stream-of-consciousness style social media. As an additional point in favor of that approach, forums were pretty instrumental to my development of programming skills as an early teenager. Without the ability to participate on forums, my skills would've been considerably stunted.
… we'd be pushing teaching social media 'literacy' to when parents lose the tools they have to teach their kids.
There are ways of teaching said literacy without allowing unrestricted access to social media. Your last paragraph suggest one such way.
It’s not an all or nothing type situation. I think it’s clear the essence of what is being discussed with the Florida law is that kids shouldn’t be granted unrestricted access to social media and those companies should be required to enforce access rules to people under a certain age.
There are some things society thinks people should not be allowed to be legally tempted with. Some people think one of those things is social media for people under a certain age.
It wasn’t absurd. It established that pretty much everyone agrees that government intervention is sometimes needed to protect people from their impulses. The idea that everyone (especially kids) can simply exercise self control when it comes things as addicting as social media is absurd.
Yes. There are some things so unhealthy that it is worthwhile to try to prevent people from using them. Heroin is one such substance in some peoples’ mind. Gambling is something that can be very addicting and destructive and as such society tries to keep kids from partaking in it. Similarly it is wise and worthwhile to keep kids off of social media.
When people say "the brain is still developing until you're 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at learning after the age of 25". Noting that, should people learn self-control in the presence of social media before 25, or after 25?
I believe the part of the brian that deals with impulse control isn’t fully developed until early 20s.
We don’t willingly and willfully let kids have access to alcohol and heroin. By your reasoning it seems like we should so that they can learn self control.
I mean a lot of Europe has fairly low age limits for purchasing alcohol, and even lower for drinking it in private.
I believe 16-year olds can still buy wine and beer at the grocery stores in Denmark. I’ve heard it’s fairly common for 14-year olds to drink at home in the UK - though the 14-to-16 range may be delaying on average since ~2010.
I don’t believe many countries allow adults access to heroin. I believe prohibition does more harm here due to lack of quality control and testing but reasonable minds could disagree.
Age of first exposure is a fairly open question across the globe. Everyone is experimenting with whats best and whats tolerable.
We agree then that limiting access to alcohol is appropriate at some age level. Different countries do it at different ages. What is optimal is society dependent.
I gather then that we are in agreement that limiting access to social media is appropriate at some age level. We perhaps disagree at what age that ought to occur.
My Dad taught me how to play video games when I was around 6. By “taught”, I mean he just let me play, but enforced a rule that I’d have to stop playing if I couldn’t hold an attentive and emotionally appropriate conversation with him while I was playing Ninntendo.
This was hard for me! I had a natural instinct to tunnel vision into the game and not hear anything anyone was saying to me. I’d also get upset at the game and get angry in my conversations.
Training this into me at a young age really helped my emotional regulation and ability to socialize around / during games and not get too sucked into them. This was especially important because I was quite ADHD and that adds a lot of emotional disregulation.
> When people say "the brain is still developing until you're 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at learning after the age of 25".
No, it means that your prefrontal cortex—which is involved in a wide range of higher-order cognitive functions (planning, decision making, working memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior, risk processing)—is still developing, so until it does fully develop (colloquially at age 25, but it can vary per individual), you may lack those skills because you physically lack the plumbing for them to be present:
> They also found important clues to brain function. For instance, a 2016 study found that when faced with negative emotion, 18- to 21-year-olds had brain activity in the prefrontal cortices that looked more like that of younger teenagers than that of people over 21. Alexandra Cohen, the lead author of that study and now a neuroscientist at Emory University, said the scientific consensus is that brain development continues into people’s 20s.
At 25 the brain is no longer plastic enough to learn self regulation. So if you wait till then to give people the chance to make mistakes you end up with a whole lot of women-children who can't function at all. The whole point is that you need to let people make mistakes so they can learn from them while they still can.
Saying that you have to wait to be an adult to make adult decisions is like saying that we shouldn't expose anyone under 3 to language since they can't speak.
I grew up with the birth of the internet and social media and I have the opposite feeling. I know that sound the old one monologue but I came from the time that social media were exclusively social and not a bunch of people creating content endlessly in the hope of making tons of money in the internet.
I used aol, Microsoft Messenger, Facebook and a very famous Google social media on my country, called Orkut. None of these gave me anxious to see what's happening or any negative thoughts. In fact In using the internet and social medja learned so many things, meet different people outside of my country and from other states and learned about other cultures and other languages.
All these years and I think the way that social media works is rotting people's brain: people barely pay attention on you because they are too busy seeing their timeline, people even use it on traffic and all of these people are adults that doesn't knew about social media until some years ago. Internet and Social media for children must be supervised and not restricted.
I understand where you’re coming from but these were not social media.
I used Orkut too. It was a place to talk to your real-life friends, join local communities and organize events. You didn’t develop a personal following or post selfies looking for approval.
Social media, as we have it today, allows individuals to broadcast their twisted mind to millions, and not via text - only cute pictures, memes, and 30-second clips. These are worlds apart.
Separate question, though - that's particular kinds of material (and for some reason US caselaw basically doesn't regard anything pornographic as "speech"), while this is a blanket restriction.
I think the argument is that there are no constitutional rights to bars, cigarettes, and porn. Social media is being held up as an example of "speech" here, which all US citizens are entitled to (at least in theory).
The question is whether the venue in which the speech is performed in is sufficiently public as to be exempt from regulation. Given that participation on these sites exposes participants to heavy commercial advertising, traffic analysis, and data harvesting, I think it's a reasonable stance that the state can regulate participation.
I’m not sure I buy “social media” = “speech”. By that definition, social media companies shouldn’t be able to prevent anyone from using their website for any reason. Being banned for anything would then be equivalent to violating someone’s rights to speech.
Social media companies aren’t required to give a voice to anyone. They are platforms for enabling exercising speech, but they aren’t speech themselves. This seems equivalent to stating that not allowing children in bars or strip clubs violates their right to assembly.
COPPA, a US federal law, has mandated that websites operating under US jurisdiction receive parental consent prior to collecting online information from children under age 13.[1][2]
As far as I'm concerned, this Florida state law practically extends it to children age 16 and under specifically with regards to social media websites and services.
This is not a blanket restriction it is a ban on social media which a specific thing. Social media != speech it is a product created by a company for profit
Looks like Bethel v. Fraser. 478 U.S. 675. 686 (1986) is the case you're looking for, in which case the court ruled that a school had the right to restrict speech of students (specifically to prevent them from swearing I think).
"Don't complain about downvotes" I think means what it says. Don't complain about them. I have been downvoted when posting a correct solution to a persons technical problem before. It happens. Take it on the chin and move on.
Technical question about free speech. Do you need to have right to see other speech to have free speech? So would it be enough for children to be able to post, but not read? As that would not violate their free speech.
It's not really a free speech question here. For instance, what a student can say in a public school (government tax payer funded) can be restricted to a point, but the courts have ruled that the 1st amendment still protects kids up to a point here. In a private school there are no such protections.
The law here is saying that social media companies are private companies and in order to do business with children they need to follow certain regulations now. This is perfectly normal and legal. For instance, a tavern has certain regulations regarding minors entry to them. There are many examples.
Your question assumes that interacting with social media is a first ammendment right which I don't think is the case. Not sure though. That's likely the reason for the downvotes.
Your comment also has a bit of a "muh free speech" vibe which some people dislike.
People might see it as harsh but looking at reality and the hard numbers collected about the gigantic negative impact it has on kids and teenagers this is the right move, would even push it till 18.
Again, not the best argument given that the drinking age is 21. Additionally, children can volunteer for the military at the age of 16. So there's clearly a range, "legally speaking".
Leaning on existing laws isn't really the best for these things, because existing laws may be flawed. Would prefer to base it on scientific insights, but we don't have much relevant for this stuff.
So the real answer is "We don't know, and different states will try different ages and see what sticks, what people will accept."
I do wonder at what age social media is supposed to stop being destructive to mental health. Based on my experience, I'm also inclined to think the answer is never, but there's too much money to be made to stop it.
This is the number we've been using recently, but it's been different in the past and there's no reason to keep using it, especially when we have data showing that 25 is the age your decision making faculties are generally fully developed
When I was a kid the argument was “if you can be drafted and sent to war you should be able to vote”. The state is still going to want those young able bodies for their militaries. Raising our age of adulthood to 25 seems unlikely to go over very well.
Because at 18 people are responsible for their own actions, and restricting them after that is unreasonable and contrary to personal freedom.
There's a consistent factoid going around that brains aren't done developing until the age of 25. It's frequently used as an argument to restrict young people.
Looking at performance by age in fields like math and music, declining brain plasticity seems more like a reason to implement the carousel from Logan's Run
I have the opposite take you have. There should be no restriction on voting age at all. Everyone possesses the right to have a say in the direction of the government that governs them.
Riiiight. Because four year olds have a strong grasp on current events and deserve a say, and totally wouldn’t just become an extra vote for whomever their parents are voting for.
Yep, I understand the practical issues with my position. But I can’t ethically condone saying “you have no voice” to a fellow citizen, so I prefer no restrictions.
There are plenty of unethical outcomes available in the "let babies vote" scenario, to weigh against the allegedly-unethical scenario of having a voting age.
Indeed there are. There are many hills I’ll die on, and while this isn’t one of them, I do find it deeply uncomfortable to so clearly deny a whole category of citizens representation.
Maybe that's an opportunity to reevaluate those restrictions rather than make the argument that because restrictions exist that one is as good as another.
It's about as logical as saying, "we put people in jail, therefore it's ok that you go to jail." The nuance and reasoning is the point.
The driving example is a bit disingenuous because, in the US at least, driving isn't conceptualized as a "right" - it's formulated as a privilege. The drinking example is closer, but that's the right to self-determination. I don't suspect that you believe children have zero self-determination, nor do I suspect that you believe that one person's right to vote should be based on everyone in a particular class.
It would be unconscionable to say, "Women shouldn't be allowed to vote because some women can't make good decisions." I simply extend the same unconscionablity to children.
That’s not the argument. The argument is: restrict children from voting due to their lack of maturity in decision-making.
We apply this argument in all kinds of cases that are super-uncontroversial so it’s surprising to hear that it makes someone uncomfortable in this particular case.
If lack of maturity predicates voting, then we're inconsistently disenfranchising individuals within classes. That doesn't seem very fair and I don't really buy feasibility as an excuse. "Sorry, but it's not practically feasible to give you the rights you deserve," is beyond the moral pale.
We have laws about how our elders with Alzheimer's and dementia vote, but self-sufficient 17 year olds have no say in how their lives will be managed for the next 4 years. There's nuance you're glossing over.
Unless you’re going to allow babies to vote, we have to draw the line somewhere. It’s also not true that a 17 year old is disenfranchised for 4 years - they can engage with the political process as an adult as soon as they turn 18. Presidential elections aren’t the only feature of democracy. They aren’t even the only vote.
Right, and drawing arbitrary lines is guaranteed to step on toes. In some ways, the fairest way is to draw it at the extreme (I'm not suggesting this is best, just that it sidesteps this particular issue). Children are humans, they're affected by political pressures same as the rest (and they'll experience these pressure for longer than most of us). We're also already choosing not to restrict voting based on assumed capacity for reasoning. Individuals with down syndrome, dementia, and Alzheimer's have their voting rights explicitly protected, but 16 year-olds aren't ready.
I guess my point boils down to simply: Why? There's arguments both ways, what's the reasoning?
For the record, I don't think that we're wrong to implement a minimum voting age, and I don't think toddlers should vote, but I still think it's a worthwhile thing to consider.
If (as I assume) our goal is to restrict voting to those deemed mature and of sound mind, then I'd expect to see similar laws enforcing such restrictions in other sectors of the populace. But we don't see that! Instead we see laws explicitly granting the right to vote to the elderly and mentally disabled. It's possible to end up in a situation where an individual is deemed mentally unfit to manage their own finances or medical decisions, but still able to influence the governance of an entire nation.
I'm personally quite fascinated by this. Maybe my assumptions are wrong! Wouldn't that be neat? My goal is not to suggest that our policy is bad or wrong, it's to suggest that the "allegedly unethical scenario of having a voting age" is actually quite complex and interesting!
Dumb example: Should Brittney Spears have the right to vote?
Whose voice does the 4 year old have? Theirs or their parents? What you do by opening the vote to children below a certain age is all you are doing is amplifying the vote of the parents, you are not giving voice to the children.
At what age does the child who can vote actually have the capacity to choose their candidate and are even able to negotiate the mechanics of voting? Let’s say 18 is too old, but how young before they are able to counter the influence of a parent and decide for themselves…I’d argue its at least well into their teens.
You aren't going to gain life experience before the age if you keep raising the age of being allowed to live life to match that age.
I know you're specifically referring to voting age, but just making a general observation on how everyone seems to only want to keep increasing these various arbitrary age gates as if simply being older is all it takes. Have you guys all forgotten when you went through these points?
I still distinctly remember how glaringly stupid I realized the world was when I had to take a waiver notice to my university dorm room and sign as my dad a few days before turning 18, and that just a few days later I'd be fine to sign it as myself, despite obviously not changing much in a few days. Either way I had been living at a university thousands of miles from my parents for nearly 2 years and had said as much, so it was a farce all around.
Similarly with turning 21 and being allowed to drink.
Obviously the US needs more mature voters. To match the very mature leaders (“”) who are so mature that they have symptoms of senility or die on the job while their helpers vote for them.
Should we put age limit on voting? 70 doesn’t have the brain functionality of an 18 year old. Why they are very susceptible to fraud because of cognitive decline.
Believe it or not, our laws apply to children too! Other government programs that can affect children include schools, roads, libraries, healthcare, welfare... They're personally affected by a lot of political stuff.
While we're at it, why should adults be the ones deciding how the public school system works? It's been more than 10 years since I was in school, I doubt my experience is still relevant.
Personally, I think we should set the voting age to 35 and cut off everyone above 37. It’s too risky to let the old or young vote. We can raise both thresholds by one per year to account for inflation.
In that case most of Congress should recuse themselves from voting on abortion bills considering they've been shooting blanks and having hot flashes since the 90s.
That you were not fully informed when you voted at 18 is not a reason to restrict the rights of others who are. Or aren't. Who's to say a 25yo is somehow any better prepared to vote? It's not like they were asked to pass a civics test first.
Plenty of "idiots" outside the age range of 18-25, should we restrict them as well? How would we determine who is qualified to vote? Any other rights provided by the constitution you'd like to alter while we're at it? What other responsibilities available 18-25 year olds would you like to restrict? The draft, driving a vehicle, taking out loans, ...? Perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to choose their own clothing, what food they eat, ...
> Because at 18 people are responsible for their own actions
This is only because we arbitrarily picked an age - we used to consider people responsible for their own actions at much younger ages, it makes sense to change the number when we get new science supporting that. If the argument is that we shouldn't use brain development as a reason to restrict young people, then why not lower the drinking age again or get rid of it?
Science has discovered that the age of 25 is when neuroplasticity starts to decline. So what? There's a lot of argumentation needed to link that physical threshold with legal restriction.
It seems like you're arguing that people shouldn't fully participate in society until they start losing their ability to learn. Have you met people who've lived overly sheltered lives until the age of 25? Their tolerance towards risk is low. Their ability to adapt to new experiences is busted. Forcing that on a society wide scale would be nuts.
The science does throw in a lot of complexity between the social ideas of freedom and the physical effects of alcohol. But have you met 18 year olds? They're drinking.
There's also the issue of life expectancy. In the US, for males? 77 years. Now we're basically saying "For the first third of your life, we're going to dictate a lot of what you can't do".
You are legally required to have auto insurance for exactly this reason. As for banking, there are limits on overdraft fees, also written into law because people are not always responsible with money regardless of age.
Excellent, have a whole group of voters who aren't allowed access to certain political information. Or are you going to raise the voting age to 25 as well?
Perhaps we should also cut off people over 65, since they've proven to be more vulnerable to scams and financial exploitation over social media?
(there's real arguments to be had about the negative effects of social media, but a serious discussion would include those on adults and old people as well, and this ban, like the TikTok one, is definitely more a part of culture war than a well-intentioned effort to improve the effect of telecoms on people's lives)
In all seriousness, this is a great move that should be emulated. I'm a tech-optimist but the effect social media has on teenagers specifically and public discourse in general is absolutely toxic.
Why not ban the businesses entirely? Certainly all the interesting points about banning TikTok apply even more to domestic companies than they do to foreign ones.
I'm a parent of an 11 and 14 year old and I have mixed feelings about this. First, I am concerned about the negative effect of social media on kids and my initial reaction to this was positive, but then I remembered my 11 year old daughter uses Messenger kids to keep up with her cousin across the country. They only see each other once a year so the fact that they have this connection I see as really positive, and the accounts on that platform are totally controlled by parents.
My son is old enough the law would give us a choice and I'd let him keep Discord I think as well. If there is something positive here though it would be forcing the companies to make it easier for parents to control what their kids do, it should just be up to them.
I guess you've never used Messenger or Discord. These are messaging applications that can do video calls. There is no timeline.
edit: actually, reading the text of the bill probably neither of those applications are in scope, because they do not have algorithmic feeds. They specifically state: "Employs algorithms that analyze user data or
information on users to select content for users;"
Perhaps that is part of the problem with these laws: we are playing a game of whack-a-mole instead of tackling the issue of mental health. While I personally avoid social media due to privacy concerns, I have encountered other adults my age who have expressed that they avoid social media for reasons related to mental health. While walking through my neighbourhood, it is clear that there are many people with mental health issues that society has all but abandoned. Then there are the people who have issues that they do not talk about and cannot be seen.
Perhaps it is because I put a heavier emphasis on the word media, but I don't really classify HN as a social media site. It's more of a forum where people discuss submitted articles. The dynamics are entirely different.
For one thing, there is a lot less "attention seeking" behaviour. While YCombinator and associated companies use it as a promotional tool, it is muted. Some end users may use it to drive traffic to their blogs or show off their skills, but it usually comes off as humble and related to common interests (or maybe the blatant self-promoters rarely make it to the front page). Even though some of the people who frequent (or pop in) here are more recognizable, I doubt that anyone is trying to win a popularity contest.
I think stuff like that is important when considering the psychological impact of a site. For good or for ill, reality is reality. In contrast, social media sites tend to be driven by fantasy: fame and fortune for creators, endless exponential growth for investors, and all of that nonsense. That distortion of reality can be damaging for those who either seek to achieve it and for those who feel they will never measure up.
I don't find the broad stroke of "mental health" very useful in any discussions since it implies there is a baseline mentally healthy state. I think some people are able to handle social media and others aren't, and that's completely fine.
While I agree that mental health is an awfully broad stroke, I have seen few discussions that represent it as a baseline for a mentally healthy state. It is typically used when either self-harm or harm to others is involved.
The mental health issue was pre-empted by the advertisement-based business model that threw everything into an algorithmic blender to begin with, causing users to scroll more and more.
> I think few people have any doubts about social media being a net negative for young people.
They should have doubts. This position is not supported by the currently available evidence[0][1][2]. The APA’s position paper makes this explicit: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”
So long as focus remains on scapegoating ‘social media’ as the main cause of suffering, we will never solve the problem. The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally, and as far as I can tell are largely manifestations of deeper societal issues that have festered for generations.
> The APA’s position paper makes this explicit: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”
I think this is just saying that social media is still part of society, and so there is nothing inherently bad in using social media, which is just an extension of our offline lives. That doesn't mean it's not harmful - if the offline life is harmful, social media can amplify it.
> The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally
The APA paper is filled with warnings specifically about adolescent social media use:
> ...potential risks are likely to be greater in early adolescence — a period of greater biological, social, and psychological transitions...
> Parental monitoring... and developmentally appropriate limit-setting... is critical, especially in early adolescence.
> Evidence suggests that exposure to maladaptive behavior may promote similar behavior among vulnerable youth, and online social reinforcement of these behaviors may be related to increased risk for serious psychological symptoms, even after controlling for offline influences.
> Research demonstrates that adolescents’ exposure to online discrimination and hate predicts increases in anxiety and depressive symptoms, even after controlling for how much adolescents are exposed to similar experiences offline.
> Data indicate that technology use particularly within one hour of bedtime, and social media use in particular, is associated with sleep disruptions. Insufficient sleep is associated with disruptions to neurological development in adolescent brains, teens’ emotional functioning, and risk for suicide.
> Research suggests that using social media for social comparisons related to physical appearance... [is] related to poorer body image, disordered eating, and depressive symptoms, particularly among girls.
If you are saying a better state would allow them on social media, something that has been shown to be detrimental to children under eighteen, how can it be a better state?
>Critics have said the bill violates the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protections for free speech and that parents, not the government, should make decisions about the online presence of their children of all ages.
It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children, especially early teens from using social media. This law should make it easier and it would put the work on Meta, Snap, Tiktok, Pinterest, Twitter to help parents.
I'm personally glad that I grew up without social media but I worry about the kids growing up now. The amount of random junk young kids are exposed to on social media is worrying.
These critics have no understanding of the law. We’ve been making exceptions for children for decades at least, probably since the beginning of the republic
I assure you I have an understanding of the law. This is such a a rude and preposterous assertion in bad faith.
This is a law mandating ID verification for all children and adults.
If you require controls for everyone below a certain age, you de facto require controls for everyone of every age who does not prove they are over the minimum age. In other words, even if you can legally discriminate against children, my rights to speak anonymously as an adult are being taken away because if I don't show my ID, I will be treated as a child who has fewer rights.
We can disagree on the merits, but please don't imply that everyone who disagrees with you is ipso facto an idiot.
Indeed. We've been round this when Facebook etc (most recently Glassdoor) instituted "real name" policies.
I'm rather confused about HN's response to this because normally when a media platform voluntarily tries to censor certain kinds of bad behavior there's a massive backlash here, and now there's seemingly overwhelming support for simply removing a whole category of people from being able to speak at all, along with whatever real ID policy gets put in place to make it work.
Well, yeah. I can go without the opinions of any underrepresented group. (A lot of theoretical computer science work in my field was done by pseudonymous children, but it's not like I need that to live.) Doesn't mean they can go without me hearing what they have to say.
I was thinking things like complexity theory. The Minecraft kids are generally more on the applied side of things: software engineering, usability work, that kind of stuff; and afaik they don't really publish in ways that are easy to cite in academia. (I'm only familiar with that sort of thing in passing.)
If you subscribe to cable, you need to prove your financial record, which excludes most people under 18. if you want to buy the special channels, you have to go through an extra set of hoops.
Buying actual real media porn in stores or mail order, require(d) some level of age verification. If it went to a minor, massive fine and or a criminal record.
You need to prove your age to drink(or buy) alcohol and drive a car, and vote. Minors are treated differently in most common law countries.
> It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children, especially early teens from using social media.
What are you talking about? Parents can use on-device controls, you can lock a phone down in many ways. There will be whiz kids who can get around these, but those few whiz kids can also easily get around any controls via legislation with VPNs.
It doesn't require a whiz kid to get around the absolutely terrible implementation of parental controls on iOS. Based on the number of bugs in ScreenTime (TikTok restricted to 15 minutes, but on the same screen shows 2.5 hours of use that day) I'm half convinced the feature is just parental control theater.
Not speaking from personal experience. My kid is only 4.
Your argument seems like exactly what my parents would have said about me spending so much time on TV, computers and electronics instead of studying, playing outside, sports etc.
Almost exactly like your last paragraph..
“I’m personally glad that I grew up without infinite channels on TV, computers and its games, cell phones and your SMSes. I’m worried about your generation. You guys are exposed to a lot of junk and things that waste your attention.” - Dad.
Yet, here we are….
May be kids of now will just need to be educated about the real impact and not be treated as if they are in glass houses?
I think there are magnitudes and cliffs for this stuff.
TV --> has quality control, professionally done, goes through a team of editors/creators before making it onto the screen
Early internet --> Mostly harmless content, can find dark stuff if kids look for it but it's pretty hard to find. More dangerous than TV but not too bad.
SMS --> just chatting with people you know. Not afraid.
TikTok, IG Reels, Youtube Shorts, Snapchat, Twitter: Good luck to you. Your kid is going to see a ton of deep fakes, edited images of unrealistic body proportions that the influencer won't disclose, heaps of radical and extremist views, undisclosed sponsorships masquerading as advice, targeted ads that anyone can buy, etc.
The magnitude is much higher now - hence I think laws need to come in to make it easier for parents to get back some control.
Go ahead and try to teach your kid who is going to spend hours each day seeing hundreds of videos each day - probably tens of thousands in a year. What are you going to do? Watch 100 Instagram Reels per day with your kid and explain each and every single one? As an adult, even I'm easily influenced by this stuff.
You make a fair point. I think you have won me over philosophically. However, there is still the pragmatic and realistic approach to consider. Personally, I think moving to a world where internet content is gated behind ID checks is a terrible and horrible precedent to set that is going to have ramifications far beyond simply protecting teens who are under 16.
As a parent of teenagers who are falling into this trap right now, it is something I am gravely concerned about. I am no tech, lightweight, and blocking and even regulating. This stuff is pretty much impossible. Short of helicopter parenting your child at all times. Nor do I think that sort of heavy-handed regulation is necessarily healthy, although that depends very much on the age in my opinion.
But what does a world look like where every website and app has to, for liability reasons alone, assume that everyone is underage before proving that they are not?
Also TVs since 2000 in the US were all required to support v-chip which allowed parents to set restrictions on content. Getting around v-chip could often be somewhat complicated. Meanwhile it is usually pretty trivial to get around parental control software on computers.
My parents couldn't switch inputs on the TV, there's zero chance they could configure a v-chip without my help. Most of my friends' parents were the same way. I don't think this technology had the impact you think it had.
> Early internet --> Mostly harmless content, can find dark stuff if kids look for it but it's pretty hard to find. More dangerous than TV but not too bad.
In the early 90's the dark stuff was mixed in with the porn. If you were looking for porn on the internet before it was available on web browsers, aka on usenet or anonymous FTP, you got exposed to the dark stuff.
And I'm fairly confident that a large percentage of teens using the Internet in the pre-WWW age were looking for porn.
as a parent you have all the control. why does your kid need a tablet? why do they need a smart phone like at all? these devices did not just magically materialize in your home, the tooth fairy didn't put them there. you chose to plop your toddler in front of a screen because electronic vicodin was easier than parenting and then you chose not to lock down their devices with the abundant parental controls you are given and then you decided you couldn't be assed to teach them basic internet safety habits or how to develop healthy skepticism and that seeing isn't always believing. really the only thing your children have been '''exposed to''' is your own laziness and utter unwillingness to offer them direction. the world will continue to exist whether we like it or not, and some day our kids will have to live in it just like we do. we can either prepare them for what's really there, warts and all or we can hide them away only toss them to the wolves when they turn 18 with the delusion that this somehow preserved their innocence. i personally believe giving them the grace of a childhood to learn how to deal with the bumpy parts of life is a much kinder option.
I understand what you are getting at, but to inject some nuance:
TV, print, radio, music and to a lesser extent games are all subject to some level of industry or statutory content regulation.
For example, in America, you're very unlikely to have a kids TV channel suddenly switch to videos of people being killed in industrial accidents. new media, not so much.
Watershed, age constraints and company ending fines existed (and in some cases still do) for violating those rules.
Large new media companies, such as facebook, youtube and tiktok can literally serve porn to kids and not have any legal ramifications. If a cable broadcaster knowingly broadcast frontal nudity before watershed, it would be fined. (yes, cable TV has less restrictions) but thats the point, regulation has not kept up with the pace of change. that has been a deliberate decision.
My kids are >5 < 12. They aren't allowed on insta/tiktok. They can have youtube, but its only when supervised. even then its 1/3 chance that they land on something toxic as shit.
The world has changed, and the guard rails that we had as kids have been removed. There is an argument about freedom of expression, I get that. But we need to think about whether its right to allow large corporations to profit from showing horrific content to minors. (adults, I don't give a shit, do what you want) The problem is, I'm not sure of the best mechanism, with the least bad outcome.
25 years ago us kids were watching viral content on the internet that wasn’t even acceptable to go on youtube then or now. Still today, we are now your young doctors and lawyers and young business executives, despite all the quite disturbing viral content that characterized the early 2000s internet. I think we did fine and I think the kids will be alright too.
25 years ago most people didn't even have a broadband connection in their home much less any kind of mobile data plan.
25 years ago kids didn't walk around with challenging to audit handheld computers. The computer, if your family had one, was that one big thing shared with the whole family that an adult could pop their head in and see what the child was up to.
That some kids (an incredibly tiny fraction) did have unrestricted access to the internet and turned out fine isn't indicative of the general population of kids having this kind of exposure and being fine. If in 1999 you had internet fast enough to really download many many hours of videos without being audited by a parent you were probably the 1% of 1% of 1% of child populations. A high percentage of households didn't even have internet at all. In 2000 only 1% of US households even had broadband internet.
I did too, but I would gently point out that you had to actively look for it. something rotten was a known site for that kinda stuff. You only went there if you were doing "illicit browsing" shall we say.
It was pretty difficult to stumble over a video of something visceral. Moreover, the internet wasn't real when we grew up.
The internet is real and omnipresent, filled with the mountains of clickbated bullshit, and only ever three videos away from some sort of porn(if you're lucky).
You really can't speak for everyone. You can maybe say this particular cohort is fine despite seeing some of this content while young, but certainly not because of it.
And 40 years ago kids were watching bootleg copies of Faces of Death. Yes, kids get to that stuff. The problem is FoD doesn't even hold a candle to the manipulative shit that social media does to kids.
It was not all that easy to get a copy of Faces of Death back then, so it was something you might have saw once maybe twice but that violent real death before your eyes was not something that you ever became de-sensitized to because those visuals were exceedingly rare by the scarcity of the content at the time(at least in the US). So that morbid curiosity itch was scratched and then you moved on. Short of the few weird kids that watched that shit over and over, you probably never watched the whole thing. I know I think I watched 10 mins back in the day before it was turned off and we went out to find some beer instead. Now, real violence and death is a search term away and available every minute, hour, and day.
But agree…even that exposure to violence now pales in comparison to the amplification of the negative peer pressures that kids today experience due to social media. At least back in the day when you were away from your peers you could escape it and gain respite. Now its constant.
There’s some survivorship bias here. Not everyone who was exposed to disturbing content is unaffected or can move past it so easily. And in 2024, it’s far more likely to encounter something you had no intention of seeing.
It’s worth thinking about the social climate right now as the long tail of the last 25-30 years of technology advancement. Mass shootings are so common now they often don’t even register on people’s radar.
These effects are so complex that we’re still trying to figure out how to measure them, but we should take seriously the power and danger of the instant wide distribution of the worst elements of humanity.
I grew up on the old Internet, and made some of my most important friendships using it. It shaped who I am today, mostly for the better. But I don’t think we can let nostalgia or even the many benefits blind us to what the Internet has become or the real harms that come along with those benefits.
> And in 2024, it’s far more likely to encounter something you had no intention of seeing.
Strongly disagree. I haven't stumbled on "goatse" level shock imagery in years. Sure you might encounter stuff you had no intention of seeing, but that's only because you're being funnelled into link farms or other for-profit crapware flooding the internet. It's very rare to stumble on something disturbing.
In the last year I have seen (on facebook no less):
various levels of war crime
the killing of people at close quarters (with the last sound that they made, which still haunts me)
A sniper killing someone taking a poo.
These were nestled in amongst memes, which were fun and engaging. None of them had content warnings.
goatse wasn't all that shocking to me, because he is very much alive. 2 girls one cup is at least a ramp into skat, rather than straight in.
Now, if a 16 year old saw that, I'd probably not worry too much, I wouldn't be happy. But if my 10 year old, or 6 year old saw that, I'd have a whole load of emotional clean up to do.
While a lot of this can definitely sound like an old man yelling at the sky, tv compared to scrolling tiktok, is like caffeine compared to crack cocaine.
imo there's a difference between goatse type momentary shock sites that we grew up with and social media that pervades every waking minute of a kid's life. Yea, the former is gross, but the latter seems like it has real lasting psychological ramifications with regard to popularity contests, body image, etc. all the things that kids already struggle with, social media turns up to 11.
I've seen the First Amendment used as an argument against the US government determining what should and shouldn't be moderated by private companies operating on private infrastructure serving private citizens. Unless we're talking about unprotected speech?
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that was your argument. That's not how I meant for you to interpret it.
I meant to get your opinion on whether the First Amendment would create a barrier for what you're proposing: government mandated moderation of protected speech on private platforms. You're talking about legislation and where to place barriers, so I thought you'd be interested in discussion. Sorry.
I think that private companies shouldn't own the public square. So long as we allow corporations to encapsulate social interaction, we will continue to fail at moderation.
I don't think that law is a really meaningful avenue to fix this problem. I do think that aggressive anti-trust action could help a lot, though. If we do want to use law, then I think the focus should be on punishment for facilitation of harm. We should be able to prosecute Facebook for hosting fraudsters and failing to moderate harmful content.
As it is, a tiny number of companies hosting the social activity of billions of people, and those companies have utterly failed to accommodate that reality with proportional moderation. The failure of Facebook to adequately moderate has already lead to genocide.
My greater dream is to replace centralized social networks and content moderation with a decentralized network of curated attestations.
I think the empirical evidence is fairly clear, actually.[1][2]
Having struggled with various forms of screen addiction myself, I find it sort of odd that a lot of people are so laissez faire about giving children the most addictive device ever created.[3] Whether or not this law is a good idea, I think it's incumbent on parents to monitor and limit screen time and access to social media. Which is difficult! When my wife and I are tired, setting my daughter down in front of an ipad is the easiest way to get a break.
It's risky to describe the claims of social studies profs as clear empirical evidence, given the history of the field.
Twenge makes some unscientific arguments in her blog post, like constantly conflating correlation with causation despite her evidence not being able to show that. She also seems to think that if she knocks down a series of counter-arguments, then that means that her own argument must be correct. Given that Haidt's identical claims already turned out to be based on very poor quality evidence [1], their argumentation must be examined carefully before rushing to action.
Still, assume for a moment that it's a correct causal inference despite the major flaws in their evidence base. There's another tricky aspect to this. The Twenge/Haidt argument is really only about teenage girls. Although Haidt is basically honest about this (see [2]), Twenge is not. The opening of her article you cite talks about teenagers in general, but the first figure only shows data for girls and women. Then the second figure is even captioned "Figure 2: tech adoption, teen depression" but the legend actually says "Depression, girls". A few paragraphs later she's making claims about "individuals" whilst providing evidence that's once again specific to teenage girls. Her article is full of sloppy conflations like this.
Anyway, needless to say, neither politicians nor academics are willing to only ban social media for girls. This would upset the left so the argument morphs seamlessly into "social media should be banned for all teenagers" which isn't a story found in their data. This punishes boys for the mental health problems of girls, but is that just?
There's also a more subtle logical problem with this argument. It assumes that teenagers are a fixed group, and thus any change in their behavior must be due to some immediate alteration to their environment. But it's not: "teenage" is a sliding window that people constantly pass through. In other words it's possible that these depressed teens have always been somehow messed up, and simply aged into the categorization they're looking at. By implication the true answer could be found in earlier periods, even as far as back as changes to childrearing practices in the late 80s/early 90s rather than something that changed specifically in 2012. One theory posits that it's something to do with the rise of extremely early daycare for infants (e.g. for children less than one or two years old), and they also have a variety of correlations to bolster their case.
It may be that social studies academics simply cannot answer such questions.
[1] https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide..."Haidt's compendium of research does point to one important finding: Because these studies have failed to produce a single strong effect, social media likely isn't a major cause of teen depression. A strong result might explain at least 10 percent or 20 percent of the variation in depression rates by difference in social media use, but the cited studies typically claim to explain 1 percent or 2 percent or less. These levels of correlations can always be found even among totally unrelated variables in observational social science studies. Moreover the studies do not find the same or similar correlations, their conclusions are all over the map."
It definitely appears much worse for girls, but afaict, depression has risen in boys as well, just by not as much. See graphs here: [1]
So if social medial is harmful in general, I don't view prohibiting it a "punishment" for boys; perhaps like less of a benefit? Regarding your second point, I imagine the data would provide some clues. If the kids that are now teens were always more depressed, I'd imagine that we'd see more pre-teen depression ~3-8 years ago. I haven't looked into it closely.
And I grant that social science statistics are often problematic -- I imagine it'll take a while to really know what's going on.
But the rise in depression is only amongst some people, not everyone uniformly. Yet nearly ~all teenagers use the internet and something that can be described as social media. So it'd be punishing the majority who can use something responsibly and even get enjoyment and benefit from it, for the lack of self control of a minority (who could easily just log off but won't).
All that assumes the link actually holds, indeed. The two articles in Reason are persuasive that it doesn't hold though. The social media discussion in that case is just a distraction that stops people figuring out the real causes.
> May be kids of now will just need to be educated about the real impact and not be treated as if they are in glass houses?
The problem with this argument is that TV had ads and while they are manipulative, they are absolutely no match for the shit that Meta, YouTube, etc pull. Kids (and quite obviously lots of adults) simply do not have the ability to deal with that.
tv, computer, radio, social media, and more broadly the internet, are mediums of communication and distribution. what tv content/substance did you grow up with? is that in and way comparable to the content/substance kids these days grow up with? the ban is on the medium but the import is on the content. too much junk on the internet these days. it doesn’t help that (1) they’re way cheaper to produce, and unfortunately (2) highly rewarded (by the platform owners) for their ability to keep users glued.
until it’s possible to have strong and reliable filters, the only way to protect tender minds is through controlled exposure.
Agree and disagree. Kids can't really understand the negative impact of the things made to alter their mind, and since their parents are responsible for them, it's their job not to just explain, but to do their best to limit or participate in their usage. This is only difficult if your children are not in your presence 24/7 (public school, hanging out at malls, etc).
What if it was the responsibility of parents to make sure their kids didn't smoke cigarettes, but it was legal for stores to sell cigarettes to kids? Responsible parents could tell their children they are forbidden from buying them, explain all the reasons why it's bad, and then kids could just walk into a store and buy them anyway. Putting it all on parents doesn't work, parents aren't capable of supervising 24/7 and it isn't reasonable to act like they are or should be.
That's a fair point. The more I think about it, I can see the argument for protecting someone against a known bad thing at a point when they cannot comprehend how bad it really is. The magnitude is different from watching TV, porn magazines, or video games. However, I do worry that the earlier list can be gated because of their physical nature. However, Kids are going to end up being exposed to Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and whatever else unless one cuts off Internet access altogether, at which point the losses pile up more than the wins.. There is no easy solution than to admit this problem will exist, and we talk often to the teenager and give doses of reality however possible.
Lol at the infinite channels on TV part really highlighting.
As an adult, I don't have cable, I use an antenna. Yes, I have streaming some streaming services.
As adults and/or parents we can make decisions that help our kids (and they might help us too)
I also use Adblock.
The TV argument is the same as devices too; We had one family TV growing up; I still refuse to have a TV in my bedroom.
In conclusion, seems like we've hit the generation where our parents used TV to parent and so now we don't know how to parents -- or, for many people, be.
Did you get exposed to far right propaganda, dehumanizing women, incitations of violence, practical suggestions of suicide, cartoons about rape followed by pregnancy and a miscarriage, or similar content on TV when you were a kid?
This is the kind of shit that’s everywhere on YT now, and your kids will stumble upon (father of one here). The “faces of death” stuff we had access to once in a blue moon is not even close.
So you grew up without AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo accounts, web forums and MySpace? Or for the generation before that, Geocities and Usenet?
The current form of interactive online platforms may be flawed but banning teens from using them is not the solution and any effective method of enforcing such a law is likely to run afoul of the 1st Amendment. Besides obviously the Tinker v. Des Moines precedent about how teens have the right to engage in non-disruptive speech at school which is probably sufficient to overturn this if the Supreme Court recognizes the precedent.
Under COPPA, the "parental consent" requirement for under-13s to sign up for online accounts turned into a de-facto ban because no parent or web site wants to deal with mailed permission forms. The informal "don't ask don't tell" policy works pretty well though because it functions as an IQ test to keep the kids who are too dumb to figure out that you're supposed to lie about your age (as I did to be able to use Geocities when I was 10) off of the internet. A "parental consent" requirement is effectively a ban which is what it was in the original law that DeSantis vetoed. But it sounds like this was a major priority for the Speaker of the state House so it was going to happen in some form possibly over the governor's veto in a worse form if he completely opposed it.
I grew up in a time when social computing was when we geeks of ages 13-15 brought each others Computers to a house and challenged each other to write games on another device.
Back in the days when I had an Acorn Atom and friends would bring their Spectrum, Oric—1, TRS-80, Commodore 64 etc.
It doesn’t work though. Using instagram web bypasses the app limit. If you set a website limit, it only applies to Safari. If you block TikTok, they will find video compilations in Spotify, which shouldn’t have to be blocked. It’s a mess.
ST can work by time as well as app. Recommend revoking app install privileges. No one should have third-party corporate surveillance apps installed anyway.
Sorry, I don’t see how that comment answers mine? In my experience it’s impossible to properly block anything that is also available as a web app (which is most of social media apps).
You can sidestep the block by simply using Chrome or Firefox. Which you'll eventually have to install due to something not working on Safari (like school software). And I would like them to have (some) internet access, so at the very least they get 30 free minutes of Instagram/whatever.
The funny thing is Facebook already has restrictions on serving ads to and collecting data from kids under 13. They have a popup that asks, "Are you over 13?" at which point my then 11 year old daughter clicked yes.
This is feel-good legislation and is not realistically enforceable. People can argue about it all they want, it won't change anything because it's not enforceable.
>It requires them to use a third-party verification system to screen out those who are underage.
As a parent, I’m concerned about social media, and it has been more or less impossible to stop my teens from using it. They were jailbreaking and using VPNs and bypassing my parental controls a lot earlier than I expected. I did notice that whenever my kids didn’t have access to phones and games for several days for whatever reason, they were less grouchy and more willing to engage with us and do family or social activities.
That said, one thing my teenagers clued me in to is that these efforts to require parental involvement by law have some underlying motivations that are not being said out loud. One of them is to out kids to their parents early and cut off online support for teens going through gender identity issues, especially gay and trans kids, perhaps under the assumption that gender identity is a choice and that online activities are somehow causal.
Considering the suicide rates among teens with gender issues, and the growing number of physiological indicators, I’m not sure cutting off all online support for them is a good idea. One of my kids does have gender identity issues and has considered suicide, and as a parent that breaks my heart and scares me more than anything. It was surprising to find out about the gender issues, and it started coming out around 14, so it’s easy to jump to conclusions that social media is a bad influence. But in retrospect, the signs had been there for a long time and we failed to see and acknowledge them. Our kid said that online support is what kept her from attempting suicide even earlier.
Yeah, what a weird spooky coincidence that someone like DeSantis would make a move that’s cut off kids’ means to countermand their parents’ information lockout.
Send them to a private school, or even better, homeschool, control what kind of people they make friends with, keep them busy with church and Sunday school and bible study, burn the books and defund the public libraries, control what music they listen to and what shows and films they watch and the games they play… and, of course, control their means of communication.
Heaven forbid your child ever be exposed to anything that might make them question the reality of this little garden of Eden you’ve imprisoned them in.
I’m not in favor of the DeSantis law for the above reasons. You appear to be against this law as well, so I’m a little baffled why you’ve turned that on me and imagined a whole lot of stuff I didn’t say. Am I correct in deducing that you are not a parent yet? I’m not religious, but this law we’re commenting on is coming from a group of people that are pandering to religion, and this law is a direct part of that effort.
I didn’t try to control my kids “information” other than when they were young trying to make the really nasty stuff not come up first or by default or on accident. They weren’t security conscious, because they were kids, so white/black lists preventing malware, phishing, and viruses seemed prudent. They also didn’t have a ton of self control, and games are infinitely more tempting than school work, chores, and even self-care and sleep, so screen time limits are useful. For example, we had multiple pee in the pants and on the couch accidents because our kids were so focused on playing games they wouldn’t stop to go to the bathroom. Google used to have a bad habit, when “safe mode” was turned off, of taking an innocuous search about human bodies and returning very hard core porn. We had an accident with one of our kids who searched carefully and incrementally for “naked ladies on the beach” and got back a list of pictures and videos of anal sex gang bangs. This was with a kid younger than 10, and the very week this happened to us, Google announced in a press release that it would start returning results that were more closely aligned with the literal search query, and it was instantly obvious to us what they meant and why they needed that.
So anyway, this is all to ask, maybe cool your jets so you’re not attacking people who might otherwise agree with you? Parental controls have legitimate functions that are not about cutting kids off from the world, and if/when you have kids you will come to understand it and probably try to use some parental controls too. Parental controls are not on & off; the term represents a whole spectrum of goals and options. Even the most absolute and strict use of parental controls, which is rare among any parents I know, is automatically less of a totalitarian option than disallowing any screen time or mobile device use.
I'm an exmormon who grew up in Utah. I have seen a very significant amount of positive engagement over social media with people who desperately need it.
My state's version of this law is to force ID-verification for porn sites. For that stated purpose, it isn't even remotely effective. But what about convincing a child to admit to their parents (or Mormon Bishop) that they watch pornography? That's where it gets truly concerning.
We did consider the idea that online activity might have contributed. That was before we recognized that the issues were present long before her online activity ever began, and before we understood how our child’s perspective, and before we knew more about the stats and indicators. Now that we’ve thought about it for a few more years, and been working through the issues with professionals, and talking a lot with our children, and listening to a lot of talking points from all sides (some educated and evidence based, and some not very educated at all), we feel a little embarrassed about our initial naïveté, regretful about the ways we failed to support our child even when we thought we were being supportive, sorry for all the kids going through this that don’t have any support system, and concerned about the damage that these culture wars are having on our society and democracy.
Social media might be contributing to gender issues and other kinds of social dysphoria in the sense that I am pretty sure the vast ocean of ignorance, prejudiced attitudes, and hate speech my kids find online have increased their fears about participating in society and reduced their confidence in being able to freely show who they are. Non-binary gender and sexuality is only a “problem” because some people say it is, and a lot of those people are online being mean. Personally I feel like the political tribalism going on in our country is a much worse problem than gender issues by many orders of magnitude. Anyway, I’m just glad my kids have some family and friends and adults near them, both online and IRL, who are accepting and loving and committed to civil rights for all…
If there were anything else that harmed over 90% of kids while potentially helping a remainder we’d generally prohibit it.
I’ve known and worked with folks facing mental health issues over the decades and usually these kind of issues come from within. The idea that instagram is a cure-all for teen self-harm is not supported.
Anecdata—we knew a teen recently with very supportive parents and a smartphone and it didn’t stop a suicide attempt. Direct intervention did.
I did not even suggest that Instagram helps with teen self-harm at all. It’d be great if we could discuss this without straw men or sniping argumentation. My kid found support from friends online, at a time when she felt like she wasn’t getting the right amount from the people in her life, which to my chargrin, included me. Direct intervention has helped, and online activity alone wasn’t going to stop everything. Direct intervention alone wasn’t going to stop everything either, and it’s important to know that the wrong kinds of direct intervention can make the problem worse. (I’m worried the DeSantis law is the wrong kind of direct intervention, for example.) Since you work with people with mental health issues, then you know full well that neither my story nor yours is a one-and-done situation. A single intervention is never the start nor the end of the story, and preventing suicide for people with depression & dysphoria is a continuous effort with lots of different forces pulling and pushing.
> It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children, especially early teens from using social media.
I'm trying to decide whether it's "extremely easy" or "extremely difficult" for parents to stop their children from having a cell phone. One the one hand, all you have to do is not spend money and not buy a phone, easy. And yet, almost every kid has a cell phone, so evidently it is hard for parents to say no.
This law will put social media in the same situation. It will be "extremely easy" for parents to simply not give permission, but, like cell phones, I think most kids will end up having social media accounts anyway.
I had a conversation with a mom recently where she wanted my input on her media choices because she thought what I was doing was cool and admirable.
It all fell apart when she realized that she'd have to yank the XBox, the PS*, the Switch, etc.
Her kid, and all of the other entitled ones with endless access to everything on the internet, are utterly intolerable when they come over -- until they go outside with my kids for a few hours and come back in with their heads reset!
Phones are not that expensive anymore. Kids can buy used phones for $100, or get hand-me-downs from friends. They can use them on wifi, or if they are able to get a prepaid SIM they can use them on cellular also.
From personal experience with a teenager - you can't stop it. They get a device from their friend, they are easy to find. They keep them hidden, and you only find them by being a total snoop and seeing new devices popup on your wifi network. Or, they only use them at friends houses on their wifi, etc.
I don't think half the people commenting in this thread have even one single clue about any of this, from real world experience. You can do everything right on your end, but they sit with their friends on their devices when not around your house.
Yes, but I still disagree somewhat. I’m reminded of flip phones in prison—one scene in Orange is the New Black is funny… kept behind tile in the toilet.
Seeing things at friends’ house is expected. We used to look at Playboy magazines for example. But that’s still scarce and better than knee-deep in porn 24/7 at home.
Why should companies be forced to help parents supervise their own children? It's ironic that DeSantis is all about parental freedom yet wants to turn the companies into a nanny.
Yeah it is difficult being a parent. Welcome to parenting and adulthood. The solution isn't more big government and a massive police/surveillance state. It's no wonder Stumpy didn't get too far in the primaries, people could spot his deep state tendencies from a mile away.
This trope that kids are more vulnerable to the influence of social media is dangerous. Media literacy, social media literacy, and internet literacy are critical for all ages, as without it you could be 10 or 40 and be equally influenced by some "influencer" you watch daily videos from. There are plenty of adults who react just as equally as a child would. Age does not guarantee maturity or competency.
One thing I worry about, as a parent in Silicon Valley, is that my kid will somehow procure a phone and hide it from us. My kids don't have enough cash to go buy a new phone without us noticing, but used phones are pretty cheap. Also, a wealthy friend/boyfriend could buy a phone and pay for cellular (MVNOs are quite inexpensive these days), which would defeat router-based monitoring. My kids are currently too young to do any of this, but I foresee it as an issue in the future.
Does this require everyone present a government ID to access anything online? Are international content provider going to be compelled to report transgressions to Florida state authorities?
I think structuring the law as a penalty is "smart" in that the government does not have to explicitly ask providers to require ID, but I can't imagine them not being at significant financial risk without doing so. This will make the providers look like the "bad guy" to an end-user.
The current political realignment is a sign that the voters have no ideological convocation and as such are intellectually bankrupt.
If you are realigning your politics due to trump, you are the problem. All political realignments are bad because they are a sign of a lack of conviction and a decay in a requirement for consistency.
In other news, 2024's 1.2T budget was recently approved.
All roads lead to Rome. Both parties generally seek to expand the scope of the state. Although there are a few Republican senators who lean towards minarchist principles.
Expect the cultural right to demand social media verification to protect the children. The illiberal left might demand ID verification to protect the public from the scourge of dangerous misinformation and hate speech.
The rationalizations will vary for either side of the spectrum. The two goal posts have been positioned. Don't be surprised when the free-kick goes down the middle and Digital ID is presented as a panacea.
"Small government" doesn't mean what you imply, it means that government exists to fill the gaps and clean up some of the "messiness" created by free markets.
Reasonable regulation and public safety is part of that.
That seems ridiculous considering virtually all social media is available both as an application, and as a website. App Store controls won’t do anything in regards to usage through the web.
Restricting access to devices is the easy part (although keeping ahead of kids breaking in is not). Exposing your kids to enormous peer pressure and social isolation is the hard part.
There's a collective action problem here, though. Some parents are willing to do the hard thing and tell their kid no over and over and over. Most aren't. The result is that kids don't hang out in person any more and so the only social outlet left is digital, which makes the decision to ban it at the family level even harder because you may actually do more harm than good by forcing your child to not participate with his friends.
If there's widespread agreement that social media is dangerous and yet widespread difficulty coordinating a response among parents, isn't that exactly what the government is for?
Kids will quickly learn that if their parents say "yes", they can get on social media, and so parents will still have to say "no" over and over again. The only difference is now we need to make sure our government papers are in order before we participate in the most important communication forum of our time.
We can apply this to everything. No one is trying to raise the age of candy and soda purchase to 16. Although we know that having access to these things drastically impacts children's health. Fast food too.
Like it's the literal job of a parent to tell their kids no. Over and over and over again. So instead of parents teaching healthy habits easy with something a child will not be a le to avoid as an adult, we'll just unleash them on them right when failure is high impact because some parents are lazy and we're not willing to have public service campaigns anymore.
Or really want this is is one more step to a de-anon'd internet, where everyone's speech can be controlled.
You don't have to do something all the way, for it to be that thing. A hop still qualifies as a jump. Demanding adults ID-verify their age is still fascism.
We did that. My kids (twins) pooled their allowance money for a few months and had a friend at school buy them an old iPhone that they shared in a locker at school. They went wild on social media once they were set loose, to the detriment of everyone involved.
There was a government report in the last couple years that concluded (paraphrasing) “the ideal amount of social media for teens is greater than zero and less than ‘all day’—but it’s not clear where it becomes harmful.”
I have wondered about that, but we didn’t keep them strictly from it. They had Instagram and a couple other things—with screen time limits and we knew their account handles. That was apparently enough friction for them to find a workaround. “Went wild” in this context means they signed up for dozens of accounts on dozens of different services—SnapChat, Discord, Instagram, and others I’d never heard of at all.
I strongly agree, but it needs to be balanced against being 14 on the open internet.
And you can't have it both ways here–it can't be "be a parent: control and limit your kids' on the internet" and "you have to give your kids complete privacy on the internet". My goal has always been to support their growth and development by giving them progressively more responsibility and autonomy as they grow up.
> And you can't have it both ways here–it can't be "be a parent: control and limit your kids' on the internet" and "you have to give your kids complete privacy on the internet".
Well I don't think I said otherwise, but not only is this rather absolute, it's not true. I don't see how limiting screen time, for example, precludes respecting their privacy.
May I ask: Why is it important to know their account handles?
Might as well put porn on TV and billboards and tell parents to cover their kids eyes and change the channel. It's about time government did something useful for once.
My daughter broke or worked around three different parental control systems, including Google's own Family Link. There is always some webview in some settings page that will not be regulated and can be used to browse the Internet or some crap like this. These systems are either all poor or this game of whack a mole is unwinnable in principle.
In light of empirical evidence, it is positive legislation. However, let us not be fooled that the problem is the algorithms. In my anecdote I see a clear divide between the classic phase of interaction in chronological order and algorithmic intervention.
The action of algorithms orchestrating human interactions reminds me of Asimov's Mule[0] and at this point in events it is certain that the algorithm builders have very fine control over human mental patterns. If I were to choose just one target for my efforts to sanitize the internet I would focus my fire on algorithms. Legislate without mercy.
> at this point in events it is certain that the algorithm builders have very fine control over human mental patterns
IMO this dramatically oversells the power of recommender systems, and in a way which further serves their owners' interests rather than challenging them. In fact, I think what's clear is that they are at best able to achieve a very gross level of control over human mental patterns, one which is not meaningfully different than previous forms of media that have popped up throughout history. "Engagement", keeping someone scrolling long enough that they accumulate a nontrivial probability of clicking on an ad, is the lowest common denominator of marketing. Television, radio, and print media have long understood how to keep people serially "engaged" (consider the 'if it bleeds it leads' mentality of local news, or the emergence of 'angertainment' on CNN or FOX in the 90s and onwards).
But stimulating engagement is very different from actually controlling someone or altering their behavior in a way beyond "hey look at this interesting thing!". Consider that the click-through rate for Meta ads is on the order of ~1%, and this is literally their most valuable metric. They achieve this not by actually persuading people that an ad they don't care about is actually interesting (which to me would be the real acid test of whether they have 'fine control'), but rather by (a) effectively segmenting the audience in a way TV can't and (b) keeping the audience engaged long enough that maybe they click an ad. While they're no doubt good at both of these things, I think it's telling that the best these platforms have been able to do is the same strategy that every other form of mass media has also stumbled on: throw enough sensational crap your way that you stick around long enough to maybe click an ad.
To your point more directly: I agree that being able to agitate large groups of people in the same way is a dangerous ability, but I think it's also one that's very old and very common. It is not the unique provenance of 'algorithms', it's just the nature of mass media acting as a demagogue (look at role of newspapers in the lead-up to the Spanish-American war, for an example that predates our modern era). The way we challenge this is IMO not by treating the problem as something entirely new and overwhelmingly powerful ("big tech algorithms are mind control rays"), it's by looking at the historical record and recycling the strategies which have worked before (libel and slander laws, journalistic ethics, and trust-busting). Certainly there are elements of the problem which are new and unique , but from where I'm sitting the differences seem smaller than the similarities.
> Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, opposed the legislation, saying it would limit parental discretion and raise data privacy concerns because of the personal information users would have to provide to be age-verified.
They can delegate or they can archive and choose not to use this data for anything other than the stated purpose.
Are they indirectly saying that they can't restrain themselves and that any data they collect for whatever reasons is fair game ?
I guess their problem is if someone submits identifying data willingly they will not be able to use it for other purposes without consent and they will look suspicious even when they infer the data/connections independently.
There’s an alternative to a blanket restriction on all types of social media:
When I was growing up, there was basically just ICQ (predominantly chat, sparse text profile), then MSN (predominantly chat, sparse text profile with one or a few profile photos), then early MySpace where nobody was uploading their real identity. I think it would have been a shame to not have access to those types of networks. I met so many people through those types of networks.
The law could put a restriction only on the post-2005 type of social media which is about publishing a curated stream of life updates with one’s real identity in rich media (photos, videos). If you take that all of that out, there’s nothing to ‘like’ or compare yourself to.
According to the article, the bill requires social media platforms ban accounts belonging to underage users and delete “personal information collected from terminated accounts”.
I’m no lawyer and haven’t read the actual text, but if you have a platform where there are no accounts and everyone posts anonymously or under a pseudonym, like 4chan, it completely sidesteps this.
The biggest problem I see is that we’re now essentially requiring ID to use substantial parts of the internet. So many business only have a Facebook page, Google maps has social features.
I already didn’t want a Facebook account just to see a businesses specials, now I’ll need to present ID too?
Certainly interested to see how all this plays out.
I’ve gotten by for the last several years without Facebook or Google (I do use a YT account, but not for anything meaningful). It’s annoying, but doable.
>I’ve gotten by for the last several years without Facebook or Google (I do use a YT account, but not for anything meaningful). It’s annoying, but doable.
I think the point is that the internet and particularly social media is now the de-facto town square. States are basically requiring identification to speak or criticize government in the town square. If you take a step back and look at it that way, it's grossly anti-American.
Imagine back in the day, if you had any type of meeting/gathering to discuss anything that might be related to politics, and the police were there to collect everyone's Id. AA meetings, computer meetups, hobby gathering, HOA meetings, etc. This is essentially that, except on a computer. Just think of the children!
If anything, these services are more similar to shopping malls. And don’t be surprised when the mall cop throws you out for causing a scene, or just lounging about and not consuming enough.
I can't reply to the other responder, but even if these are shopping malls... Those are already acknowledged as common spaces at least in California where most of them are headquartered. Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, it was held that a shopping mall was not allowed to remove students asking for signatures on a motion.
PruneYards was found not to be significantly harmed by the expressive activity, because the goal of the commercial activity is to sell stuff. But the goal of an online social media platform is to curate a coherent speech product, and allowing people to insert themselves unwanted into that product is a very significant imposition on the platform.
Also no one lives or eats or breathes on Twitter so the notion that they are exercising an online platform the same way they would exercise the park on Main Street does not follow.
Not to mention the fact that the entire point of the town square is that it is a place for discussion of the function of the polis with the citizenry of the polis. Online social media is a place to consume garbage from foreign actors and influencers.
>PruneYards was found not to be significantly harmed by the expressive activity, because the goal of the commercial activity is to sell stuff. But the goal of an online social media platform is to curate a coherent speech product, and allowing people to insert themselves unwanted into that product is a very significant imposition on the platform.
That is true but unrelated to the DeSantis law. The social media companies obviously don't want to kick kids off their platform considering they are a significant portion of their audience.
The DeSantis law states the government is mandating that social media companies ID everybody. This does have precedent though because governments require bars and food marts to ID young people for cigarettes, but it's different because they are not required to ID everybody. I'm not sure they are even required to ID people, they can just be prosecuted for selling cigarettes and alcohol to minors. I think the ID part was just the most convenient way to not get prosecuted.
Of course requiring social media companies to ID everybody will have a massive chilling effect on political discourse. That might be part of the objective or at least a convenient side effect.
It is related. One poster suggested that the online platforms (which are, for a number of reasons previously noted, not town squares) are actually more like shopping malls. Another post noted that shopping malls (in California) can be subject to requirements to allow someone else’s speech in their area of commerce.
But online platforms are not like shopping malls, because online platforms sell advertiser access to a coherent speech product, which is distinct from the sale of goods in ways that profoundly affect first amendment protection of their business.
>But online platforms are not like shopping malls, because online platforms sell advertiser access to a coherent speech product, which is distinct from the sale of goods in ways that profoundly affect first amendment protection of their business.
But the social media companies aren't the ones who want age verification and to kick people off their platforms, the government is. The companies want kids in their audience, kids want to be in their audience, many parents are fine with kids in their audience, it's the government of Florida who wants to ban kids.
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding but you seem to be arguing that social media companies should be allowed to kick people off their platforms, which would trump the individual's free speech. That isn't the issue here.
This discussion has gotten a bit convoluted. I apologize for not being clear. Original idea was that the government can’t kick every kid off social media because social media is the public square and kicking people out of the public square is wrong.
The reason why this argument is bad is that online social media platforms aren’t the public square. They’re not the public square because they are something else: a coherent speech product.
They are allowed to kick people off because they produce a coherent speech product.
But you are right, the fact that they are allowed to kick people off is not directly related to the fact the government wants to bar kids from using these sites.
Are you and I in full agreement now? I think we might be.
>the government can’t kick every kid off social media because social media is the public square and kicking people out of the public square is wrong.
I think kicking kids off isn't the primary complaint. I think that to enforce kicking kids off requires social media platforms to ID everyone to ensure they aren't kids. That's the chilling effect. Fewer people will post their true feelings (good or bad), which lessens citizen discourse (which IMO is bad).
>They’re not the public square because they are something else: a coherent speech product.
How do you define a coherent speech product and what makes it unable to also be a public square?
Even if it was the town square many actual town squares require adults to accompany minors. Sure enough if you had a bunch of unattended 12 year olds hanging out the cops would be called and parents asked to be parents.
Even worse would happen if you left your 6 year old wonder around the town square unattended while you went to a movie.
Except that's new too. When I was a kid, I could travel wherever I wanted without anyone calling the police on me. It was just normal for gangs of elementary schoolers to wander about. I'm a millennial, so it wasn't even that long ago this was a thing.
The issue here has absolutely nothing to do with how it affects kids, it has to do with how it affects adults. Again: "States are basically requiring identification to speak or criticize government in the town square."
The fact that the legislation is intended to affect kids is irrelevant if the only legally permitted way to comply damages the individual liberties of adults.
To be clear, I'm not trying to suggest an ulterior motive on the part of DeSantis or the Florida legislature. But effectively requiring a government ID to exercise free speech on the internet damages individual liberty (again, of adults) regardless of whether that's an intended effect or not.
>Even if it was the town square many actual town squares require adults to accompany minors. Sure enough if you had a bunch of unattended 12 year olds hanging out the cops would be called and parents asked to be parents.
This has become such a common trope that I think people fail to apply even a modicum of scrutiny: the internet is not the town square and whatever your idea of the town square is likely wrong if you think its as wild-west-y as the internet is.
Firstly, try to approach children in the town square while wearing a mask for anonymity; or try to hold up images of porn in your town square. You will not be there long, you'd likely be detained, and you'd likely be asked for identification.
Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town square? I have lived in several large US cities and several small towns. In neither was there any sort of common place where we all congregated to address matters of the town. At best, there are city hall/city council meetings where the public can speak but at least in my town (and I know of many others), identification is required to prove that you live in the town!
Even the founding fathers, when writing under pseudonyms, understood that anonymity and circulation was incumbent upon them to maintain, not that they were entitled to it because "town square."
To address your last point: this is not simply some ill conceived moral panic/think of the children type moment. Go try to host - as an adult - an AA meeting or "computer meetup" with children that happens to be held in the local adult toy shop. See how well that goes for you. At this point, we know children are getting approached by adults at a large scale on instagram, we know children are getting exposed to a lot of adult content on twitter, and on the spectrum between innocent HOA meeting and damaging to society as a whole, its clearly more towards the latter.
>This has become such a common trope that I think people fail to apply even a modicum of scrutiny: the internet is not the town square
Where is the majority of politics and recent events discussed? Where are new ideas shared and accepted or rejected? Where is this topic being discussed? Case rested.
>Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town square?
It's an international phenomenon, probably as old as civilizations.
If actual politics reflected sentiment on the internet, US politics would look very different. The Overton window on the internet is very different from real life, there is tremendous bot traffic from outside the US, there are people with multiple accounts, and algorithms and "trust and safety" rules that promote certain views above others. You are confusing signal and noise. The majority of politics - that matter - is not discussed online, the majority of new ideas are not shared/accepted/rejected online - even in a business sense most founders know their cofounders personally, not from online chats. Case rested.
You idea of the town square is also outdated. Do you think the municipal government in Rome still meets at the Forum? And you did not address my point that even if it did exist as it did in whatever millennium you yearn for, would the behavior that is present on the internet be tolerated the same way? Was the Forum or Copley or Dock square known for adult men showing their genitalia to underage women? Your idea of a town square is antiquated and likely would not have tolerated the behavior you think the internet should just because its the town square. Case rested.
> The rest of your post sounds like moral panic.
Nice rebuttal there. If it's just moral panic, why does the data suggest that social media use its detrimental to adolescents' mental health and well being? Why is the effort to curtail social media influence on kids' a bipartisan effort in an increasingly partisan society? Even the misguided level of libertarianism you're probably advocating for understands that short of pure anarchy, there are some externalities governments have to address, chief among them are social media platforms that are evidently harmful to certain parts of society (young kids). Case rested.
"Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town square?"
Cities and towns in the US were once often built around town squares. Many cities have open public areas like this in Europe and South America where people can congregate. Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires comes to mind. Cities in the US haven't been designed around a central town square in a long time, but the term has stuck colloquially.
Below is a link to William Penn's original plan for Philadelphia, where the city would have a five town squares, with one in the center of each of four quadrants, and the largest in the city center.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gary-Libecap/publicatio...
My point is not that they NEVER existed, its that they no longer exist in the capacity most people mean when they use the term. As you mentioned, cities used to be organized around them. Most people now live in cities that are either don't have one at all or don't have one that is used in the way they were hundreds of years ago.
Furthermore, the behavior that was tolerated in the town square would not be close to what we tolerate online. And we don't afford kids the freedom in the real world that we do online. I am not sure why people think that requiring parental consent or age verification online is some sort of assault on personal liberty.
I think this again comes back to the idea of thinking of it as some sort of digital town square.
We don't seem to have an issue with the government requiring businesses to check ID for alcohol, tobacco, porn (in the physical world), and firearms. Movie theaters check ID for rated R movies if you appear to be under 17. In fact, a lot of online retailers of alcohol and tobacco now require ID to be verified at purchase instead of at delivery.
Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/etc are not the digital town square; the most charitable analogy for them is they they are merchants in the town square. And the rules should still apply to them.
For the most part, those real-world ID checks do not involve keeping a record, or a durable storage of what you say, or see, or listen to while you're there.
There's nothing preventing us from the law requiring the same for online verification. It doesn't have to be the case that Facebook or Twitter or whatever store any information other than at some point they did verify your age.
As to the other information, you're more making the case that online tracking should be illegal (which I'd agree with). For the majority of people, they are either unaware or uninformed about how to prevent online tracking to a sufficient degree. If you're signed into your Google and Facebook accounts and then surfing the web, theres a good chance you're getting caught up in cross site tracking. Hell, even if you don't have accounts explicitly, its not like Facebook isn't tracking non-users. In the real world, stalking is illegal.
Also, in my state (Washington), IDs now have barcodes on them. When I buy beer at the store, the clerk doesn't even look at my ID; he/she scans it and thats it. I'd hope the information about what type of beer and how often I buy it isn't being stored somewhere but I'm just hoping.
H.B.3 only prohibits these minors holding accounts on social media. They can still browse, as can anyone without an account and age verification. You'd be able to view a business's information, watch videos, etc etc etc, just not create your own.
It also has conditions for which sites are affected by this law. The site has to have doomscroll and already be popular with kids. Google Maps isn't what they're targeting.
Honestly, mixed feelings. I'm in no rush to show Zuck my passport but the flagrant grooming comments on every kid's TikTok account is enough to show there's a significant problem, even if this isn't the right answer.
How many social media sites allow you to do anything without an account? Twitter used to be wide open but X competely locked down. Instagram lets you click 2 things and then the paywall pops up. I'm not sure about Facebook but it isn't much better.
Without speaking to merits, the entire point of this law is to reduce usage by minors. So being able to do less without an account is a feature through this lens.
This is an unfair parallel, but it's like worrying about businesses who advertise on pornographic sites or on cigarette boxes. Allowing visibility to businesses who advertise on a certain platform could be judged (by society, law, and voters) to be outweighed by the need to restrict youth access to social media. There is a variety of precedent in society and law in restricting youth access to something that is otherwise deemed legal. Just because businesses advertise on social media (in my opinion), the decision to restrict access should not be altered by that advertising strategy.
It will be interesting for businesses like restaurants that don't have paper menus but have you scan a code that opens an IG with their menu in an album. Frankly, I applaud the state for eliminating this use case.
That doesn't sound true to me... Idk specific policies, but my experience was that I was never logged in to twitter on my desktop and I was never login-walled out until recently under elon.
> People without a Twitter account or who weren’t logged in used to be able to scroll the platform’s homepage and view public accounts and tweets. But as of this week, when such a user opens the platform they are met with a screen prompting them to sign up or sign in to Twitter.
A plus of this law would be if this would force social media sites to stop locking down read access behind a sign up wall.
I think the barrier to entry with creating a new account on each site right now is low when no ID is required - so social media sites lock everything down.
With the new friction of requiring ID, it could be harder to get users to create accounts so locking down everything won't make sense from a viewership access perspective.
What I’m really unclear about is whether providers are required to use an actual ID to age verify. Does anyone know?
The bill summary on the Florida senate webpage says:
> Such commercial entities must verify, using either an anonymous or standard age verification method, that the age of a person attempting to access the material harmful to minors satisfies the bill’s age requirements.
It sounds to me like “anonymous age verification method” could just mean that the website asks how old you are? What constitutes verification here? That sentence makes it sound like they can choose to use whatever feeble method they want.
At face value this law seems like political points being scored by passing a widely popular law that changes very little in practice (bumping the minimum age from 13 to 14).
Anonymous verification could be something like OAuth. Government run or certified probably. You'd need to provide an ID to OAuth provider once, but the actual service requesting verification would get as little as your age and email.
Online pot dispensaries do it by having you upload an id.
Texas expects porn sites to do it by having you upload an id.
How does Florida expect a site to do it?
This is a legitimate question that I want the answer to. Presumably "check this box" isn't going to cut it. So if it's not the most common way to enforce an actual legal restriction, then what is it?
There's really no need for ID checking. Most porn sites already self-regulated by marking their content adult with meta tags/headers.
Parental control software picks up on that. [1]
Social media could do the same thing: make a social media adults-only meta tag for parental control software to use.
For the parents that care, and use parental control software, the ID laws won't stop their kids running into porn. The porn their kids are going to encounter is going to be on non-porn sites like twitter or reddit (or small sites that don't care about these laws anyway).
Maybe we needed a bigger push for more awareness or better parental control software but the ID law push is weird and unamerican to me.
This law might have never come up if we had better parental controls at every level of the software and hardware stack.
I'm a parent I have parent controls setup on my child's devices but it's very hard to dial it in properly and cover all the bases. It should be far more straight forward to manage than it is now.
I'm obviously pretty tech savvy and I would say 99% of parents are not going to get this right.
iOS parental controls are awful. The only way to get any decent control for my concerns that the moment is using the downtime features all day long. Effectively I've told iOS that he should be in bed for 23 hours and 55 minutes a day. It's ridiculous and extremely limiting.
Microsoft's parental controls are sort of ok. I also have separate control software for Windows and I have controls at the router. Of course, none of things can talk to each other to create a coordinated plan (say giving X number of screen time hours per day).
iOS controls effectively block adult sites and you can manually add sites to block and not allow apps being installed without your permission. What else do you need?
A solution to these issues is for the child to not have the device in the first place. A desktop computer in a central place with eye on it can go a long way in managing online activities.
As a parent, as a former child, as someone that grew up with computers in places just like you describe, let me say, in my personal and professional experience… lol
You’re right about parental controls, especially apple ScreenTime. I’ve used computers almost my entire life, I even work for Apple, and I still resorted to calling tech support about it. As far as I can tell, they don’t actually do anything useful, and instead just get in the way.
I do disagree that a technical solution could have avoided laws like Texas. It’s not about “protecting the children”. It’s never about the children. It’s just censorship. It’s just easier to go after a porn site than it is a library.
I'm not asked for ID when I order a drink. The bartender takes a look at my ugly mug and makes the call: I'm [painfully] clearly over 25.
Facebook has more than enough processing power to have an AI watch you reading a script straight to camera for 30 seconds to work out a rough age. If you're within 5 years of their idea of 18, surrender that ID, the same way you would if you were in a bar. Don't want to? Don't maintain a social media account. Don't have that drink.
The alternative is setting up a government-maintained 0Auth-style hand-off. They know who you are. The social media site could open a verification ticket, you authenticate with your government and they sign your ticket without the social media site getting any of your details. The trade-off with that is cost and your government now knows you're on TikTok. For some people that last one matters.
If you paired these laws with strong PII protection (see GDPR) to stop social media sites storing this stuff indefinitely, using your data against you, it might be an easier sell.
You have a bit more faith in a technical solution working at scale than I do, but I have to point out, that after repeatedly claiming that no one wanted an ID scan, your proposal involves an ID scan.
I also have to point out, that PII and GDPR protections are meaningless here. Under a government mandated censorship regime, the threat is the government, not some data broker somewhere.
The reason I have faith in a pure-technology solution is because setting up ID-linked database APIs will take time and querying it will cost social networks real money. When this was discussed in the UK, we were looking at 10p per check. That's $1m for Florida alone plus engineering to get it in.
They have innumerable GPU cycles they could redirect to a ML solution, and more importantly this is something that ML and facial recognition systems have been doing in prosumer-grade hardware for well over a decade. If I could set something up to do this in an afternoon, I believe Facebook probably could too.
My proposal only involves ID if you look young enough that the AI isn't certain or you don't want to upload a video. It's cutting out ID checks for 99% over 25yo.
But I do see this more about child safety than a censorship regime. Social networks are poison, even to adults. They're designed to trap us there, keep up "engaging" and not wander off to another platform. Our ability to make an informed choice about whether our kids are being damaged by them (and the people on them - who we have no control over) is seriously diminished. I've seen the stuff my daughters' 8yo friend uploads and the comments would change your mind. Yes, I'm biased, but I don't think that makes me (or this) wrong.
> How do you imagine that will be enforced? Perhaps by... ID?
Emphasis mine. It's that that which I'm disputing.
This law does not require you to have an account to go onto a website. It is a law that requires you are age-checked to hold an account on social media platforms. These are different things.
Holding an account —broadly speaking— allows you to post, like, comment, follow and be profiled in an enduring fashion. Some of these can have life-long implications that 12 year olds aren't equipped to evaluate. How many adults can identify unhealthy social media usage and do something to stop it?
I don't know how age verification will work in practice. Checking a government ID is one way but if you're handing that off to a third party service, it's expensive. They don't need to know who you are for certain. A similar check is when you buy alcohol. If you look young, you're asked for ID.
When I buy alcohol, I'm not because I look like a man with kids nearing his forties. It would be far cheaper for Facebook to have an AI watch a video of you speaking to camera, with ID as a fallback. Many social media platforms are ingesting gigabytes of our faces every day so. They probably already know the rough ages of their users.
But going on a website (eg Youtube) doesn't require you have a profile. Going on Facebook business pages doesn't require it. If anything, laws like this might mean that things like Instagram have to be more open to preserve their reach. Not a bad outcome, IMO.
When you buy alcohol, it’s very easy to see whether they are taking and storing your picture. You can also buy alcohol with cash leaving no digital footprint.
And is AI the new blockchain that will magically solve every problem? And most children over 14 don’t have government IDs either.
If you don’t want your kids to be on Facebook, use parental controls. It’s the parents responsibility.
I live in Florida for context. The same government officials talk out of the left side of their mouths about “parental choice” and now this law says children can’t be on social media even with parental consent.
Parental choice exists where parents can make informed choices.
You don't know how much their child is being affected by platforms that have been designed to be addictive, that go out of their way to spur conflict and argument (sorry, "engagement"), and that have so few parental controls that it's near impossible for a parent to actually vet what's going on, who's interacting with them.
You're not even allowed to give your kids alcohol. There's clearly some precedence for protecting kids from their parents' inability to make informed choices.
And ML models for detecting age have existed for a long time. It's not magic unicorn dust. It's just one way to avoid this ID stuff that everybody is upset about.
Then educate the parents and tell them about parental controls.
But would you be okay if I used that same argument about why open computing platforms are bad because adults don’t know enough about computers to avoid malware and ransomware?
Big government forced licensure upon motor vehicle operators because early on they demonstrated a tendency to cause societal harm. There is a place where libertarian ideals have to be curtailed for the greater good.
You didn’t answer the question. It’s one thing for the government to have your ID and tied to a physical activity. Do you want Facebook to have a copy of your ID? Do you want the government to be able to ask Facebook who said something that offended them for your real ID?
There have been cases where the cops arrested someone for criticizing them on Facebook
The law appears to require Facebook offer "anonymous age verification" through a third party (so ID is not shared with Facebook), and requires that third party must not retain or share PII used for verification.
By showing a third party their ID that doesn't share the actual ID with eg, Facebook. That third party would then share their status with Facebook. Facebook doesn't get the ID, but does get to verify that they're of age (or not).
If we have to accept the negative impact of bullets in our childrens' bodies from spree killers and cops as a necessary evil to preserve the Second Amendment then yes, we should accept the negative impact of the internet as a necessary evil to preserve the First.
Kids-only internet (moderated by child development phds, idk) you need specific, cheap hardware to access. Less walled garden, more sandbox. It wouldn't be a place for entrepreneurs.
Registration and access maintained at the county level or smaller so that community standards and relationships shape adoption and use.
Low age cutoff with actual adults trying to connect put in jail and on a list.
Who is going to pay for it and who is going to decide what’s appropriate? If the government decides, what happens when a party is in control of government that has opposite views than yours?
This is not true! I was looking at a hair salon and bakery recently. Both, being run by millennials, have nothing but a google maps listing and an Instagram account. But I don't have one and after looking at a few photos of cakes and hairstyles, it gives me the boot and asks me to sign in to see more! Adding mandatory government ID to that is crazy.
They sound like incompetent business proprietors. When did having a website become something exclusively for old people? Millennials are in their 30s and 40s.
> When did having a website become something exclusively for old people?
It's more that having a website never became a thing for many businesses in the first place. 30 years ago they might have had a listing in the phone book. Nowadays that kind of business might have a facebook page, or more recently an instagram account. Creating a website (even with something like wix) requires a level of skill and effort above that.
It is not just 15$ a month. You need to pay someone to develop the website in the first place and then deal with all kinds of issues that eventually arise (updating the underlying framework and/or getting hacked and dealing with the consequences, solving random stuff like expired SSL certificate, etc.).
Idk how something like a cafe would necessarily benefit the business to have a dedicated website. A facebook (or google maps) page presents relevant info such as location/hours/menu in a predefined schema, so neither the owner or the customer need to worry about formatting it (or understanding the format).
Their competence is measured by their success, not your opinions. And it turns out that in many professions, an insta is the thing you need for success.
If you don't like it, that's your problem, not theirs. You're part of a small enough group they don't care about. I'm not sure how that's an age question in the first place, though. The "being run by millenials" throwaway by GP is just... well, at best, sloppy thinking.
There are GenZ businesses websiting, there are boomers insta-ing. You pick the tool for your niche.
Well, I went to the bakery and I can attest that they are indeed run by millennials. I will argue with the technical ineptness point made earlier though. If you can figure out how to make videos with music and edit in animated graphics using the tools Instagram or whoever else provides, you can figure out Wix's website builder.
I guess that’s my point though. isn't it a very rational BUSINESS decision to go some where 80% of people and probably 99% of their target market are on these platforms that provide them with free distribution? Outside of the moral qualms of that 1% of people that don’t have a social media account or use google?
Sure. Would you also remark on their hair color? Shoe size? First letter of their name? Because those are likely about as relevant to their choice of advertising medium. It might be true, but there's no relevance.
And the point isn't if Wix is hard or not. It's that they answered the question "where do we need to advertise" for themselves, and just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's wrong.
I agree, but I think your problem isn't Zuck, it's with passports.
Government issued licences aren't fit for purpose any more. They were when all you did with your paper drivers licence is show it to the police, but now they've become a form of ID you show man+dog who gets to scrape a whole pile of into from it that can be used to track you. For example, they can follow your passport number or drivers licence to connect a series of what should look like unrelated transactions.
As an example, now when a car rental company wants to know you have a valid licence they demand a copy of it. If you have an accident they use the copy to prove they verified you are licenced to drive, if you do something illegal they can hand over your ID so the police can chase you down. FIDO / WebAuthn / PassKey shows how those things can be achieved without leaking all the information on the licence. It can hand over a one time token saying you have a valid licence and signed by something that chains back to a public key held by the government. The token reveals nothing more than that to the car hire firm, but should they hand it over to the police they can decrypt it to identify you.
These tokens are useless if stolen. They can't link you to other transactions and don't identify you in any way, and yet are far more secure than a bunch of unsigned pixels. In other words unlike a copy of a passport, mostly harmless.
Its happening. My coauthor wanted to make some updates before sending it out to people. I'll send you a draft soon, I promise! Its just coming together slower than I'd like. Always slower :S
> gets to scrape a whole pile of into from it that can be used to track you
I can't help but feel your argument is with data protection [and the broad lack of it in the US] rather than government-held databases.
I have a couple of online government authentication methods. There could easily be an AVS API where a website kicks me off to to my government, and they sign a request for age verification, all with very little cost and fuss. That obviously causes uproar from people who think my government doesn't suspect I touch myself when they're not looking.
And a suggestion I've made in a couple of other sibling threads is having an AI watch you reading a script in realtime. I had to do this for a mortgage application a few years ago. Probably cheaper than a government API, and a high success rate on 25yo+ similar to facial-only checking in bars.
> I can't help but feel your argument is with data protection [and the broad lack of it in the US] rather than government-held databases.
It goes deeper than that. Recently in Australia we've had two data breaches, one from a Telco [0] and another from a credit card company [1]. Both were required to collect ID by law, so they gave you a portal to upload photos of drivers licences, government medical insurance cards, credit card and so on. In both cases they leaked the lot.
To say they were unpopular was an understatement. Perhaps 10% of Australia had to get new drivers licences. The were hauled up to front senate committees, CEO's fell on the sword. A lot of political theatre in other words, but while this "take a copy of a government licence as a form of ID" madness continues it will keep happening.
In other news, social hacks against the government electronic ID for their website were used to collect around 1/2 a billion in fraudulent payouts (tax refunds and the like) [2]. And a few years ago the tax office was done for $2B or so for ID fraud waged against our VAT collection. [3] That one was perpetrated by thousands; the instructions went viral on TikTok.
We live in a digital world now, where it's easy to take a copy of any bag of bits. Relying on ID's that don't mutually authenticate and vigorously protect the information they do hand out is downright dangerous.
Apple, Google or any other trusted provider could do anonymous attestation of being over a certain age. Apple already has the framework in safari to attest that you aren't a bot.
Pretty wild to watch the basic rights of people in red states backslide in real time. Now there is the (what should be unnecessary) legal question of whether you can even run a social media platform with anonymous users in the state of Florida. Needing de facto governmental verification to communicate with people on the internet is something I had hoped I would never live to see in America. Hopefully it will not be fully enforced to the letter of the law.
There isn't really such a question. The law explicitly requires anonymous third-party age verification to be offered as an option. There are definitely concerns about how well that will work in practice, and I would definitely want to wait and see how it works in Florida before advocating for a wider rollout, but this Florida bill is actually the most reasonable of these age verification requirements rolled out to date.
I'm all for a healthy skepticism of government intervention, but my feeling is let's let Florida try this out and see what happens.
Like I said, let's wait and see. I don't expect all kids to keep off social media—not all kids stay away from alcohol either—what I'd hope is that a significant enough percentage of them stay off that kids who do stay off have an easier time setting up healthier interaction patterns among their friend groups.
You say there is no question, but it is already being raised by social media companies as an issue with the law. Anonymous age _verification_ is not something that exists. This requires government documentation, which means any solution that involves storing identity verification information would de facto allow the government to unmask users. This raises serious free speech concerns for everyone that uses these websites in Florida.
1) 3rd party service (Verifier) receives government documentation proving that the owner of {{account ID}} is over the age of 21.
2) Verifier records the fact that the owner of {{account ID}} has proven they are of the age of majority. They throw away all other identifying information, including their exact age.
3) The individual logs in to Verifier from Social Media. Verifier certifies to Social Media that the individual is over the age of majority.
There's no technical barrier preventing this outcome, and if you read the text of the law this is very clearly what the legislature envisions. Will it work? I don't know. Let's wait and see.
Let's just ignore the fact this doesn't exist for the sake of going through the mental exercise. Whether identity services are allowed to discard the logs is a legal question. The time in which a user makes a verification request for a website is de-anonymizing in of itself. The government could access both services either in real-time (remember this has already happened here) or depending on how things are stored at a later date to link identities to accounts. So the government has ways get all the information it needs to de-anonymize people who use social media in Florida if enforced.
You skipped over the Verifier expecting to be paid in some manner, being very likely to be paid using credit card, and thus having to retain those logs. Thus still making it easy to unmask users.
A fairly basic version of anonymous verification would be that local stores sell an age token. You show them your ID, like you would for buying alcohol, and they give you the token which could then be used with online services to prove you're over a certain age.
It only becomes a problem if stores are forced to store the ID and link it to the token in some way.
The biggest thing about social media is that it NEVER stops. Growing up, if you had trouble with bullying at school, it ended when you went home, your home was your safe zone. Now there are no safe zones.
not only that, but i fully believe that kids are WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY to impressionable and influenceable. there is a reason kids can't do a lot of things until 18 (even through the brain doesn't fully develop till 25). kids should not be influenced by social media to be doing permanent things that could harm themselves (like gender transitioning, getting a tatoo or piercing, or doing something dangerous challege) or their future careers (like breaking the law so they have a criminal record).
honestly social media is a wonderful thing, but something has to be done. i personally believe that parents need to have more power in discipling their children. i don't like the fact that laws like this have to be created, but i see that they have to exists with the more power they take away from the parents.
> if you had trouble with bullying at school, it ended when you went home, your home was your safe zone.
I went to school just at the cusp of digital bullying. A yahoo group was set up specifically to bully one kid in my class. It was shut down by yahoo, but I think because it was hosting porn, not because it was mostly designed for bullying people.
This was in the days of shared computers, and no real notifications. Now the bully is in your pocket.
I don't know what the equitable answer is. out right banning is wrong. But we do need to significantly more to allow people to escape bullying.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 365 ms ] threadWhat makes you think the state law would get struct down in federal court?
A rational solution that would work? Can't have that, won't have that. Who said this? Stop that person from breathing. (sarcasm folks.)
The key word is “everyone” and it’s a collective action problem.
Excellent article in The Atlantic titled “End the Phone Based Childhood Now” which covers this extensively.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-...
The study cited in this excellent - but paywalled - article is here: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/2023-131/
The law proposed here is a stupid hammer that won't do anything but piss everyone off. Definitely what I've come to expect from my worthless state government (I live here, I'm sorry, ive tried to replace these people several times)
Certainly not everyone.
There are many people that back this.
We’re looking for actual solutions here, not to check a box and pretend we tried
It'd be a privacy nightmare if everyone ended up sending all the major websites a copy of their passport/driving license to get access.
And policies like "tick box to confirm you're over 18" are a pointless joke.
Facebook came out when I was in college, and I resisted for one semester; then if felt "inevitable" [that I join] since almost all classmates were on thefacebook.
----
At present, I do not carry a cell phone nor use email [it is heavenly, a rare gift]. When somebody is more than ten minutes late for a planned meetup, I depart.
At 16 there are at least 2 years where parents have the ability to actually interfere and help bring any negative effects under control.
If you push off the learning to when the person can legally just do whatever they want, all you're doing is abdicating parental responsibility and setting the person up for addiction as an adult.
..heroin was the primary means of social interaction for the majority of adults..
We aren't talking about adults we are talking about kids. That the majority of adults use social media for social interaction is a separate problem and in no way indicates that we should subject kids to something as highly addicting and harmful as social media (in its current incarnation).
There are tons of studies that show that social media harmful to peoples' mental health. It is profoundly dumb for society to subject kids to it. In same way it is profoundly dumb to let drug companies advertise. People are easily manipulated and kids especially so.
While social media is addictive and unhealthy, it is the primary means of social interaction among adults, thus, just as we introduce high schoolers to adult things like driving, sex, job interviews, citing other's work etc through partial exposure to such things (eg junior driving permits, sex ed, mock interviews or relaxed punishments for academic dishonesty), we should be teaching kids how to have a healthy relationship with social media through limited exposure BEFORE they turn 18.
To this extent, I prefer one of the other suggestions in this post, that there should be two 'tiers' of social media, kids should still be allowed to access small platforms, and in particular, forums. Those are easier to monitor for parents and lack many of the ills of more 'modern' stream-of-consciousness style social media. As an additional point in favor of that approach, forums were pretty instrumental to my development of programming skills as an early teenager. Without the ability to participate on forums, my skills would've been considerably stunted.
There are ways of teaching said literacy without allowing unrestricted access to social media. Your last paragraph suggest one such way.
It’s not an all or nothing type situation. I think it’s clear the essence of what is being discussed with the Florida law is that kids shouldn’t be granted unrestricted access to social media and those companies should be required to enforce access rules to people under a certain age.
I believe we are in agreement on this.
Wait, do... do people actually buy that reason for the War on Drugs?
We don’t willingly and willfully let kids have access to alcohol and heroin. By your reasoning it seems like we should so that they can learn self control.
I believe 16-year olds can still buy wine and beer at the grocery stores in Denmark. I’ve heard it’s fairly common for 14-year olds to drink at home in the UK - though the 14-to-16 range may be delaying on average since ~2010.
I don’t believe many countries allow adults access to heroin. I believe prohibition does more harm here due to lack of quality control and testing but reasonable minds could disagree.
Age of first exposure is a fairly open question across the globe. Everyone is experimenting with whats best and whats tolerable.
I gather then that we are in agreement that limiting access to social media is appropriate at some age level. We perhaps disagree at what age that ought to occur.
This was hard for me! I had a natural instinct to tunnel vision into the game and not hear anything anyone was saying to me. I’d also get upset at the game and get angry in my conversations.
Training this into me at a young age really helped my emotional regulation and ability to socialize around / during games and not get too sucked into them. This was especially important because I was quite ADHD and that adds a lot of emotional disregulation.
No, it means that your prefrontal cortex—which is involved in a wide range of higher-order cognitive functions (planning, decision making, working memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior, risk processing)—is still developing, so until it does fully develop (colloquially at age 25, but it can vary per individual), you may lack those skills because you physically lack the plumbing for them to be present:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_cortex
* https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...
> They also found important clues to brain function. For instance, a 2016 study found that when faced with negative emotion, 18- to 21-year-olds had brain activity in the prefrontal cortices that looked more like that of younger teenagers than that of people over 21. Alexandra Cohen, the lead author of that study and now a neuroscientist at Emory University, said the scientific consensus is that brain development continues into people’s 20s.
* https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-development-25-ye...
Of course even post-"25" some folks still may lack them as well, but at that point there's no longer anything physically preventing you from doing so.
Saying that you have to wait to be an adult to make adult decisions is like saying that we shouldn't expose anyone under 3 to language since they can't speak.
I used Orkut too. It was a place to talk to your real-life friends, join local communities and organize events. You didn’t develop a personal following or post selfies looking for approval.
Social media, as we have it today, allows individuals to broadcast their twisted mind to millions, and not via text - only cute pictures, memes, and 30-second clips. These are worlds apart.
(note that rules which require proof of age tend also to turn into rules that end anonymity, because it's more work to separate the proof systems)
Edit: I ask a question about caselaw and end up at -3? Yes, I know, don't complain about downvotes, but I don't understand these at all.
The list goes on and on.
I fail to see how not being allowed on Facebook is different.
Social media companies aren’t required to give a voice to anyone. They are platforms for enabling exercising speech, but they aren’t speech themselves. This seems equivalent to stating that not allowing children in bars or strip clubs violates their right to assembly.
As far as I'm concerned, this Florida state law practically extends it to children age 16 and under specifically with regards to social media websites and services.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Prot...
[2]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-C...
Here's a discussion of US law as it pertains to children that you might find interesting. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
"Don't complain about downvotes" I think means what it says. Don't complain about them. I have been downvoted when posting a correct solution to a persons technical problem before. It happens. Take it on the chin and move on.
The law here is saying that social media companies are private companies and in order to do business with children they need to follow certain regulations now. This is perfectly normal and legal. For instance, a tavern has certain regulations regarding minors entry to them. There are many examples.
Your comment also has a bit of a "muh free speech" vibe which some people dislike.
Leaning on existing laws isn't really the best for these things, because existing laws may be flawed. Would prefer to base it on scientific insights, but we don't have much relevant for this stuff.
So the real answer is "We don't know, and different states will try different ages and see what sticks, what people will accept."
In the US, under 18, only with parental consent.
A lot of states are removing restrictions for under 18 workers.
Also, drinking age is 21.
There's a consistent factoid going around that brains aren't done developing until the age of 25. It's frequently used as an argument to restrict young people.
Looking at performance by age in fields like math and music, declining brain plasticity seems more like a reason to implement the carousel from Logan's Run
There's something to be said for waiting until people have actual life experience.
It's about as logical as saying, "we put people in jail, therefore it's ok that you go to jail." The nuance and reasoning is the point.
My conclusion: No. Children should not be able to do those things. Therefore, there are likely other things they should not be allowed to do.
I honestly can't believe we're even having this discussion.
The driving example is a bit disingenuous because, in the US at least, driving isn't conceptualized as a "right" - it's formulated as a privilege. The drinking example is closer, but that's the right to self-determination. I don't suspect that you believe children have zero self-determination, nor do I suspect that you believe that one person's right to vote should be based on everyone in a particular class.
It would be unconscionable to say, "Women shouldn't be allowed to vote because some women can't make good decisions." I simply extend the same unconscionablity to children.
I of course disagree with that statement, but it would imply that some women _can_ make good decisions.
To carry that back to the original argument, you are implying there are children out there who are capable of participating in political discourse.
I disagree.
It's starting to feel a bit like I'm feeding the trolls here, so I'll let this be my final reply. Have a good day.
We apply this argument in all kinds of cases that are super-uncontroversial so it’s surprising to hear that it makes someone uncomfortable in this particular case.
I guess my point boils down to simply: Why? There's arguments both ways, what's the reasoning?
The reason is loki's fallacy is a fallacy for a reason.
For legal purposes we simply have to pick a line.
But regardless if the exact location of that line is arbitrary, it is still useful none the less.
There is no real issue with having an arbitrary line, if it is impractical to not have an arbitrary line, and useful none the less.
To give more obvious examples, we can take the drinking age, or the age of consent. Those line are arbitrary, but are still useful none the less.
If (as I assume) our goal is to restrict voting to those deemed mature and of sound mind, then I'd expect to see similar laws enforcing such restrictions in other sectors of the populace. But we don't see that! Instead we see laws explicitly granting the right to vote to the elderly and mentally disabled. It's possible to end up in a situation where an individual is deemed mentally unfit to manage their own finances or medical decisions, but still able to influence the governance of an entire nation.
I'm personally quite fascinated by this. Maybe my assumptions are wrong! Wouldn't that be neat? My goal is not to suggest that our policy is bad or wrong, it's to suggest that the "allegedly unethical scenario of having a voting age" is actually quite complex and interesting!
Dumb example: Should Brittney Spears have the right to vote?
Interesting example: Should felons?
At what age does the child who can vote actually have the capacity to choose their candidate and are even able to negotiate the mechanics of voting? Let’s say 18 is too old, but how young before they are able to counter the influence of a parent and decide for themselves…I’d argue its at least well into their teens.
I know you're specifically referring to voting age, but just making a general observation on how everyone seems to only want to keep increasing these various arbitrary age gates as if simply being older is all it takes. Have you guys all forgotten when you went through these points?
I still distinctly remember how glaringly stupid I realized the world was when I had to take a waiver notice to my university dorm room and sign as my dad a few days before turning 18, and that just a few days later I'd be fine to sign it as myself, despite obviously not changing much in a few days. Either way I had been living at a university thousands of miles from my parents for nearly 2 years and had said as much, so it was a farce all around.
Similarly with turning 21 and being allowed to drink.
While we're at it, why should adults be the ones deciding how the public school system works? It's been more than 10 years since I was in school, I doubt my experience is still relevant.
That you were not fully informed when you voted at 18 is not a reason to restrict the rights of others who are. Or aren't. Who's to say a 25yo is somehow any better prepared to vote? It's not like they were asked to pass a civics test first.
The drinking age in all 50 states is 21 thanks in most part to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...
In Florida it was raised to 21 in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._history_of_alcohol_minimu...
In Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands it's still 18
This is only because we arbitrarily picked an age - we used to consider people responsible for their own actions at much younger ages, it makes sense to change the number when we get new science supporting that. If the argument is that we shouldn't use brain development as a reason to restrict young people, then why not lower the drinking age again or get rid of it?
You can join the military and drive a tank into war at 18, but god forbid we let you have a beer afterward.
It seems like you're arguing that people shouldn't fully participate in society until they start losing their ability to learn. Have you met people who've lived overly sheltered lives until the age of 25? Their tolerance towards risk is low. Their ability to adapt to new experiences is busted. Forcing that on a society wide scale would be nuts.
The science does throw in a lot of complexity between the social ideas of freedom and the physical effects of alcohol. But have you met 18 year olds? They're drinking.
In many jurisdictions you cannot do those things without adult supervision.
Perhaps we should also cut off people over 65, since they've proven to be more vulnerable to scams and financial exploitation over social media?
(there's real arguments to be had about the negative effects of social media, but a serious discussion would include those on adults and old people as well, and this ban, like the TikTok one, is definitely more a part of culture war than a well-intentioned effort to improve the effect of telecoms on people's lives)
In all seriousness, this is a great move that should be emulated. I'm a tech-optimist but the effect social media has on teenagers specifically and public discourse in general is absolutely toxic.
My son is old enough the law would give us a choice and I'd let him keep Discord I think as well. If there is something positive here though it would be forcing the companies to make it easier for parents to control what their kids do, it should just be up to them.
edit: actually, reading the text of the bill probably neither of those applications are in scope, because they do not have algorithmic feeds. They specifically state: "Employs algorithms that analyze user data or information on users to select content for users;"
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/3/BillText/er/PDF
For one thing, there is a lot less "attention seeking" behaviour. While YCombinator and associated companies use it as a promotional tool, it is muted. Some end users may use it to drive traffic to their blogs or show off their skills, but it usually comes off as humble and related to common interests (or maybe the blatant self-promoters rarely make it to the front page). Even though some of the people who frequent (or pop in) here are more recognizable, I doubt that anyone is trying to win a popularity contest.
I think stuff like that is important when considering the psychological impact of a site. For good or for ill, reality is reality. In contrast, social media sites tend to be driven by fantasy: fame and fortune for creators, endless exponential growth for investors, and all of that nonsense. That distortion of reality can be damaging for those who either seek to achieve it and for those who feel they will never measure up.
What if reducing social media usage was a good way of tackling mental health issues?
They should have doubts. This position is not supported by the currently available evidence[0][1][2]. The APA’s position paper makes this explicit: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”
So long as focus remains on scapegoating ‘social media’ as the main cause of suffering, we will never solve the problem. The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally, and as far as I can tell are largely manifestations of deeper societal issues that have festered for generations.
[0] https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8221420/
[2] https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...
I think this is just saying that social media is still part of society, and so there is nothing inherently bad in using social media, which is just an extension of our offline lives. That doesn't mean it's not harmful - if the offline life is harmful, social media can amplify it.
> The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally
The APA paper is filled with warnings specifically about adolescent social media use:
> ...potential risks are likely to be greater in early adolescence — a period of greater biological, social, and psychological transitions...
> Parental monitoring... and developmentally appropriate limit-setting... is critical, especially in early adolescence.
> Evidence suggests that exposure to maladaptive behavior may promote similar behavior among vulnerable youth, and online social reinforcement of these behaviors may be related to increased risk for serious psychological symptoms, even after controlling for offline influences.
> Research demonstrates that adolescents’ exposure to online discrimination and hate predicts increases in anxiety and depressive symptoms, even after controlling for how much adolescents are exposed to similar experiences offline.
> Data indicate that technology use particularly within one hour of bedtime, and social media use in particular, is associated with sleep disruptions. Insufficient sleep is associated with disruptions to neurological development in adolescent brains, teens’ emotional functioning, and risk for suicide.
> Research suggests that using social media for social comparisons related to physical appearance... [is] related to poorer body image, disordered eating, and depressive symptoms, particularly among girls.
You are probably joking and know that.
It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children, especially early teens from using social media. This law should make it easier and it would put the work on Meta, Snap, Tiktok, Pinterest, Twitter to help parents.
I'm personally glad that I grew up without social media but I worry about the kids growing up now. The amount of random junk young kids are exposed to on social media is worrying.
This is a law mandating ID verification for all children and adults.
If you require controls for everyone below a certain age, you de facto require controls for everyone of every age who does not prove they are over the minimum age. In other words, even if you can legally discriminate against children, my rights to speak anonymously as an adult are being taken away because if I don't show my ID, I will be treated as a child who has fewer rights.
We can disagree on the merits, but please don't imply that everyone who disagrees with you is ipso facto an idiot.
I'm rather confused about HN's response to this because normally when a media platform voluntarily tries to censor certain kinds of bad behavior there's a massive backlash here, and now there's seemingly overwhelming support for simply removing a whole category of people from being able to speak at all, along with whatever real ID policy gets put in place to make it work.
Hot take but I can go without the opinions of children.
If you subscribe to cable, you need to prove your financial record, which excludes most people under 18. if you want to buy the special channels, you have to go through an extra set of hoops.
Buying actual real media porn in stores or mail order, require(d) some level of age verification. If it went to a minor, massive fine and or a criminal record.
You need to prove your age to drink(or buy) alcohol and drive a car, and vote. Minors are treated differently in most common law countries.
What are you talking about? Parents can use on-device controls, you can lock a phone down in many ways. There will be whiz kids who can get around these, but those few whiz kids can also easily get around any controls via legislation with VPNs.
Your argument seems like exactly what my parents would have said about me spending so much time on TV, computers and electronics instead of studying, playing outside, sports etc.
Almost exactly like your last paragraph.. “I’m personally glad that I grew up without infinite channels on TV, computers and its games, cell phones and your SMSes. I’m worried about your generation. You guys are exposed to a lot of junk and things that waste your attention.” - Dad.
Yet, here we are….
May be kids of now will just need to be educated about the real impact and not be treated as if they are in glass houses?
TV --> has quality control, professionally done, goes through a team of editors/creators before making it onto the screen
Early internet --> Mostly harmless content, can find dark stuff if kids look for it but it's pretty hard to find. More dangerous than TV but not too bad.
SMS --> just chatting with people you know. Not afraid.
TikTok, IG Reels, Youtube Shorts, Snapchat, Twitter: Good luck to you. Your kid is going to see a ton of deep fakes, edited images of unrealistic body proportions that the influencer won't disclose, heaps of radical and extremist views, undisclosed sponsorships masquerading as advice, targeted ads that anyone can buy, etc.
The magnitude is much higher now - hence I think laws need to come in to make it easier for parents to get back some control.
Go ahead and try to teach your kid who is going to spend hours each day seeing hundreds of videos each day - probably tens of thousands in a year. What are you going to do? Watch 100 Instagram Reels per day with your kid and explain each and every single one? As an adult, even I'm easily influenced by this stuff.
As a parent of teenagers who are falling into this trap right now, it is something I am gravely concerned about. I am no tech, lightweight, and blocking and even regulating. This stuff is pretty much impossible. Short of helicopter parenting your child at all times. Nor do I think that sort of heavy-handed regulation is necessarily healthy, although that depends very much on the age in my opinion.
But what does a world look like where every website and app has to, for liability reasons alone, assume that everyone is underage before proving that they are not?
In the early 90's the dark stuff was mixed in with the porn. If you were looking for porn on the internet before it was available on web browsers, aka on usenet or anonymous FTP, you got exposed to the dark stuff.
And I'm fairly confident that a large percentage of teens using the Internet in the pre-WWW age were looking for porn.
It also fails at abusive or addicted family members.
TV, print, radio, music and to a lesser extent games are all subject to some level of industry or statutory content regulation.
For example, in America, you're very unlikely to have a kids TV channel suddenly switch to videos of people being killed in industrial accidents. new media, not so much.
Watershed, age constraints and company ending fines existed (and in some cases still do) for violating those rules.
Large new media companies, such as facebook, youtube and tiktok can literally serve porn to kids and not have any legal ramifications. If a cable broadcaster knowingly broadcast frontal nudity before watershed, it would be fined. (yes, cable TV has less restrictions) but thats the point, regulation has not kept up with the pace of change. that has been a deliberate decision.
My kids are >5 < 12. They aren't allowed on insta/tiktok. They can have youtube, but its only when supervised. even then its 1/3 chance that they land on something toxic as shit.
The world has changed, and the guard rails that we had as kids have been removed. There is an argument about freedom of expression, I get that. But we need to think about whether its right to allow large corporations to profit from showing horrific content to minors. (adults, I don't give a shit, do what you want) The problem is, I'm not sure of the best mechanism, with the least bad outcome.
25 years ago kids didn't walk around with challenging to audit handheld computers. The computer, if your family had one, was that one big thing shared with the whole family that an adult could pop their head in and see what the child was up to.
That some kids (an incredibly tiny fraction) did have unrestricted access to the internet and turned out fine isn't indicative of the general population of kids having this kind of exposure and being fine. If in 1999 you had internet fast enough to really download many many hours of videos without being audited by a parent you were probably the 1% of 1% of 1% of child populations. A high percentage of households didn't even have internet at all. In 2000 only 1% of US households even had broadband internet.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...
It was pretty difficult to stumble over a video of something visceral. Moreover, the internet wasn't real when we grew up.
The internet is real and omnipresent, filled with the mountains of clickbated bullshit, and only ever three videos away from some sort of porn(if you're lucky).
You will see we are in a dead end.
I don't think this law will change the trend unless there is major concerted effort.
Boys have access to so much porn and gaming that they are checking out of real life. Girls have their problems too with social media.
But agree…even that exposure to violence now pales in comparison to the amplification of the negative peer pressures that kids today experience due to social media. At least back in the day when you were away from your peers you could escape it and gain respite. Now its constant.
It’s worth thinking about the social climate right now as the long tail of the last 25-30 years of technology advancement. Mass shootings are so common now they often don’t even register on people’s radar.
These effects are so complex that we’re still trying to figure out how to measure them, but we should take seriously the power and danger of the instant wide distribution of the worst elements of humanity.
I grew up on the old Internet, and made some of my most important friendships using it. It shaped who I am today, mostly for the better. But I don’t think we can let nostalgia or even the many benefits blind us to what the Internet has become or the real harms that come along with those benefits.
Strongly disagree. I haven't stumbled on "goatse" level shock imagery in years. Sure you might encounter stuff you had no intention of seeing, but that's only because you're being funnelled into link farms or other for-profit crapware flooding the internet. It's very rare to stumble on something disturbing.
various levels of war crime
the killing of people at close quarters (with the last sound that they made, which still haunts me)
A sniper killing someone taking a poo.
These were nestled in amongst memes, which were fun and engaging. None of them had content warnings.
goatse wasn't all that shocking to me, because he is very much alive. 2 girls one cup is at least a ramp into skat, rather than straight in.
Now, if a 16 year old saw that, I'd probably not worry too much, I wouldn't be happy. But if my 10 year old, or 6 year old saw that, I'd have a whole load of emotional clean up to do.
The main problem is that most of the "appropriate" content is soul-sucking, biased, addictive and empty of substance.
sounds a lot like tv
Adults can be traumatized, too. Making this about children has us putting up barriers in the wrong places.
I meant to get your opinion on whether the First Amendment would create a barrier for what you're proposing: government mandated moderation of protected speech on private platforms. You're talking about legislation and where to place barriers, so I thought you'd be interested in discussion. Sorry.
I think that private companies shouldn't own the public square. So long as we allow corporations to encapsulate social interaction, we will continue to fail at moderation.
I don't think that law is a really meaningful avenue to fix this problem. I do think that aggressive anti-trust action could help a lot, though. If we do want to use law, then I think the focus should be on punishment for facilitation of harm. We should be able to prosecute Facebook for hosting fraudsters and failing to moderate harmful content.
As it is, a tiny number of companies hosting the social activity of billions of people, and those companies have utterly failed to accommodate that reality with proportional moderation. The failure of Facebook to adequately moderate has already lead to genocide.
My greater dream is to replace centralized social networks and content moderation with a decentralized network of curated attestations.
Education about the real impact will not happen if there is profit to be made in forsaking education.
Having struggled with various forms of screen addiction myself, I find it sort of odd that a lot of people are so laissez faire about giving children the most addictive device ever created.[3] Whether or not this law is a good idea, I think it's incumbent on parents to monitor and limit screen time and access to social media. Which is difficult! When my wife and I are tired, setting my daughter down in front of an ipad is the easiest way to get a break.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23522...
[2] https://jeanmtwenge.substack.com/p/yes-its-the-phones-and-so...
[3] Sure, it's not technically "the device," itself, but rather what it makes possible.
Twenge makes some unscientific arguments in her blog post, like constantly conflating correlation with causation despite her evidence not being able to show that. She also seems to think that if she knocks down a series of counter-arguments, then that means that her own argument must be correct. Given that Haidt's identical claims already turned out to be based on very poor quality evidence [1], their argumentation must be examined carefully before rushing to action.
Still, assume for a moment that it's a correct causal inference despite the major flaws in their evidence base. There's another tricky aspect to this. The Twenge/Haidt argument is really only about teenage girls. Although Haidt is basically honest about this (see [2]), Twenge is not. The opening of her article you cite talks about teenagers in general, but the first figure only shows data for girls and women. Then the second figure is even captioned "Figure 2: tech adoption, teen depression" but the legend actually says "Depression, girls". A few paragraphs later she's making claims about "individuals" whilst providing evidence that's once again specific to teenage girls. Her article is full of sloppy conflations like this.
Anyway, needless to say, neither politicians nor academics are willing to only ban social media for girls. This would upset the left so the argument morphs seamlessly into "social media should be banned for all teenagers" which isn't a story found in their data. This punishes boys for the mental health problems of girls, but is that just?
There's also a more subtle logical problem with this argument. It assumes that teenagers are a fixed group, and thus any change in their behavior must be due to some immediate alteration to their environment. But it's not: "teenage" is a sliding window that people constantly pass through. In other words it's possible that these depressed teens have always been somehow messed up, and simply aged into the categorization they're looking at. By implication the true answer could be found in earlier periods, even as far as back as changes to childrearing practices in the late 80s/early 90s rather than something that changed specifically in 2012. One theory posits that it's something to do with the rise of extremely early daycare for infants (e.g. for children less than one or two years old), and they also have a variety of correlations to bolster their case.
It may be that social studies academics simply cannot answer such questions.
[1] https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide... "Haidt's compendium of research does point to one important finding: Because these studies have failed to produce a single strong effect, social media likely isn't a major cause of teen depression. A strong result might explain at least 10 percent or 20 percent of the variation in depression rates by difference in social media use, but the cited studies typically claim to explain 1 percent or 2 percent or less. These levels of correlations can always be found even among totally unrelated variables in observational social science studies. Moreover the studies do not find the same or similar correlations, their conclusions are all over the map."
[2] https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epi...
So if social medial is harmful in general, I don't view prohibiting it a "punishment" for boys; perhaps like less of a benefit? Regarding your second point, I imagine the data would provide some clues. If the kids that are now teens were always more depressed, I'd imagine that we'd see more pre-teen depression ~3-8 years ago. I haven't looked into it closely.
And I grant that social science statistics are often problematic -- I imagine it'll take a while to really know what's going on.
[1] https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa...
All that assumes the link actually holds, indeed. The two articles in Reason are persuasive that it doesn't hold though. The social media discussion in that case is just a distraction that stops people figuring out the real causes.
The problem with this argument is that TV had ads and while they are manipulative, they are absolutely no match for the shit that Meta, YouTube, etc pull. Kids (and quite obviously lots of adults) simply do not have the ability to deal with that.
until it’s possible to have strong and reliable filters, the only way to protect tender minds is through controlled exposure.
So you're just saying it is difficult.
If you hang too close you're a helicopter parent. If you aren't around and they do something wrong idiots scream "where are the parents!?"
As an adult, I don't have cable, I use an antenna. Yes, I have streaming some streaming services.
As adults and/or parents we can make decisions that help our kids (and they might help us too)
I also use Adblock.
The TV argument is the same as devices too; We had one family TV growing up; I still refuse to have a TV in my bedroom.
In conclusion, seems like we've hit the generation where our parents used TV to parent and so now we don't know how to parents -- or, for many people, be.
This is the kind of shit that’s everywhere on YT now, and your kids will stumble upon (father of one here). The “faces of death” stuff we had access to once in a blue moon is not even close.
The current form of interactive online platforms may be flawed but banning teens from using them is not the solution and any effective method of enforcing such a law is likely to run afoul of the 1st Amendment. Besides obviously the Tinker v. Des Moines precedent about how teens have the right to engage in non-disruptive speech at school which is probably sufficient to overturn this if the Supreme Court recognizes the precedent.
Under COPPA, the "parental consent" requirement for under-13s to sign up for online accounts turned into a de-facto ban because no parent or web site wants to deal with mailed permission forms. The informal "don't ask don't tell" policy works pretty well though because it functions as an IQ test to keep the kids who are too dumb to figure out that you're supposed to lie about your age (as I did to be able to use Geocities when I was 10) off of the internet. A "parental consent" requirement is effectively a ban which is what it was in the original law that DeSantis vetoed. But it sounds like this was a major priority for the Speaker of the state House so it was going to happen in some form possibly over the governor's veto in a worse form if he completely opposed it.
Both.
Back in the days when I had an Acorn Atom and friends would bring their Spectrum, Oric—1, TRS-80, Commodore 64 etc.
Most the bad stuff I saw on the internet ~99/2000 was from IRC.
I had the unfortunate idea to nick myself TheGiver after the novel at 14.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
I give screen time more as a reward for hard work and getting chores done.
I use the screen time feature on Apple devices to limit my kids screen time and the type of apps they can access.
I don't believe it supports time by site inside a browser, even with Safari.
This blocks even educational apps.
This is feel-good legislation and is not realistically enforceable. People can argue about it all they want, it won't change anything because it's not enforceable.
>It requires them to use a third-party verification system to screen out those who are underage.
We'll see how well that works.
That said, one thing my teenagers clued me in to is that these efforts to require parental involvement by law have some underlying motivations that are not being said out loud. One of them is to out kids to their parents early and cut off online support for teens going through gender identity issues, especially gay and trans kids, perhaps under the assumption that gender identity is a choice and that online activities are somehow causal.
Considering the suicide rates among teens with gender issues, and the growing number of physiological indicators, I’m not sure cutting off all online support for them is a good idea. One of my kids does have gender identity issues and has considered suicide, and as a parent that breaks my heart and scares me more than anything. It was surprising to find out about the gender issues, and it started coming out around 14, so it’s easy to jump to conclusions that social media is a bad influence. But in retrospect, the signs had been there for a long time and we failed to see and acknowledge them. Our kid said that online support is what kept her from attempting suicide even earlier.
Send them to a private school, or even better, homeschool, control what kind of people they make friends with, keep them busy with church and Sunday school and bible study, burn the books and defund the public libraries, control what music they listen to and what shows and films they watch and the games they play… and, of course, control their means of communication.
Heaven forbid your child ever be exposed to anything that might make them question the reality of this little garden of Eden you’ve imprisoned them in.
I didn’t try to control my kids “information” other than when they were young trying to make the really nasty stuff not come up first or by default or on accident. They weren’t security conscious, because they were kids, so white/black lists preventing malware, phishing, and viruses seemed prudent. They also didn’t have a ton of self control, and games are infinitely more tempting than school work, chores, and even self-care and sleep, so screen time limits are useful. For example, we had multiple pee in the pants and on the couch accidents because our kids were so focused on playing games they wouldn’t stop to go to the bathroom. Google used to have a bad habit, when “safe mode” was turned off, of taking an innocuous search about human bodies and returning very hard core porn. We had an accident with one of our kids who searched carefully and incrementally for “naked ladies on the beach” and got back a list of pictures and videos of anal sex gang bangs. This was with a kid younger than 10, and the very week this happened to us, Google announced in a press release that it would start returning results that were more closely aligned with the literal search query, and it was instantly obvious to us what they meant and why they needed that.
So anyway, this is all to ask, maybe cool your jets so you’re not attacking people who might otherwise agree with you? Parental controls have legitimate functions that are not about cutting kids off from the world, and if/when you have kids you will come to understand it and probably try to use some parental controls too. Parental controls are not on & off; the term represents a whole spectrum of goals and options. Even the most absolute and strict use of parental controls, which is rare among any parents I know, is automatically less of a totalitarian option than disallowing any screen time or mobile device use.
My state's version of this law is to force ID-verification for porn sites. For that stated purpose, it isn't even remotely effective. But what about convincing a child to admit to their parents (or Mormon Bishop) that they watch pornography? That's where it gets truly concerning.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-his...
Here's something for you!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Bugis_society
Social media might be contributing to gender issues and other kinds of social dysphoria in the sense that I am pretty sure the vast ocean of ignorance, prejudiced attitudes, and hate speech my kids find online have increased their fears about participating in society and reduced their confidence in being able to freely show who they are. Non-binary gender and sexuality is only a “problem” because some people say it is, and a lot of those people are online being mean. Personally I feel like the political tribalism going on in our country is a much worse problem than gender issues by many orders of magnitude. Anyway, I’m just glad my kids have some family and friends and adults near them, both online and IRL, who are accepting and loving and committed to civil rights for all…
I’ve known and worked with folks facing mental health issues over the decades and usually these kind of issues come from within. The idea that instagram is a cure-all for teen self-harm is not supported.
Anecdata—we knew a teen recently with very supportive parents and a smartphone and it didn’t stop a suicide attempt. Direct intervention did.
I'm trying to decide whether it's "extremely easy" or "extremely difficult" for parents to stop their children from having a cell phone. One the one hand, all you have to do is not spend money and not buy a phone, easy. And yet, almost every kid has a cell phone, so evidently it is hard for parents to say no.
This law will put social media in the same situation. It will be "extremely easy" for parents to simply not give permission, but, like cell phones, I think most kids will end up having social media accounts anyway.
It all fell apart when she realized that she'd have to yank the XBox, the PS*, the Switch, etc.
Her kid, and all of the other entitled ones with endless access to everything on the internet, are utterly intolerable when they come over -- until they go outside with my kids for a few hours and come back in with their heads reset!
I don't think half the people commenting in this thread have even one single clue about any of this, from real world experience. You can do everything right on your end, but they sit with their friends on their devices when not around your house.
Seeing things at friends’ house is expected. We used to look at Playboy magazines for example. But that’s still scarce and better than knee-deep in porn 24/7 at home.
At least the other side doesn't hide the fact that they're in favor of regulations.
FTFY
In the US, at least, all significant parties are parties of big government...
Should 7-11 be required to stop children from buying pornography magazines?
Now do alcohol, cigarettes, adult bars
This concept that "the other side" can't do anything right is going to be the end of society.
If you are realigning your politics due to trump, you are the problem. All political realignments are bad because they are a sign of a lack of conviction and a decay in a requirement for consistency.
All roads lead to Rome. Both parties generally seek to expand the scope of the state. Although there are a few Republican senators who lean towards minarchist principles.
Expect the cultural right to demand social media verification to protect the children. The illiberal left might demand ID verification to protect the public from the scourge of dangerous misinformation and hate speech.
The rationalizations will vary for either side of the spectrum. The two goal posts have been positioned. Don't be surprised when the free-kick goes down the middle and Digital ID is presented as a panacea.
https://www.google.com/search?q=digital+ID+site%253Aweforum....
Reasonable regulation and public safety is part of that.
We don't need Daddy Government to make decisions that can and should be made by parents.
If there's widespread agreement that social media is dangerous and yet widespread difficulty coordinating a response among parents, isn't that exactly what the government is for?
Like it's the literal job of a parent to tell their kids no. Over and over and over again. So instead of parents teaching healthy habits easy with something a child will not be a le to avoid as an adult, we'll just unleash them on them right when failure is high impact because some parents are lazy and we're not willing to have public service campaigns anymore.
Or really want this is is one more step to a de-anon'd internet, where everyone's speech can be controlled.
The only effective response I'm aware of is a collective one. This is not that. This is fascism.
fascism is when no kids on the internet
We did that. My kids (twins) pooled their allowance money for a few months and had a friend at school buy them an old iPhone that they shared in a locker at school. They went wild on social media once they were set loose, to the detriment of everyone involved.
There was a government report in the last couple years that concluded (paraphrasing) “the ideal amount of social media for teens is greater than zero and less than ‘all day’—but it’s not clear where it becomes harmful.”
TL;DR-nature, uh, finds a way…
Do you think keeping them away from it initially drove them to this faster?
I would've taken offence to this bit too, FWIW. Privacy is important.
I strongly agree, but it needs to be balanced against being 14 on the open internet.
And you can't have it both ways here–it can't be "be a parent: control and limit your kids' on the internet" and "you have to give your kids complete privacy on the internet". My goal has always been to support their growth and development by giving them progressively more responsibility and autonomy as they grow up.
Well I don't think I said otherwise, but not only is this rather absolute, it's not true. I don't see how limiting screen time, for example, precludes respecting their privacy.
May I ask: Why is it important to know their account handles?
The action of algorithms orchestrating human interactions reminds me of Asimov's Mule[0] and at this point in events it is certain that the algorithm builders have very fine control over human mental patterns. If I were to choose just one target for my efforts to sanitize the internet I would focus my fire on algorithms. Legislate without mercy.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_and_Empire
IMO this dramatically oversells the power of recommender systems, and in a way which further serves their owners' interests rather than challenging them. In fact, I think what's clear is that they are at best able to achieve a very gross level of control over human mental patterns, one which is not meaningfully different than previous forms of media that have popped up throughout history. "Engagement", keeping someone scrolling long enough that they accumulate a nontrivial probability of clicking on an ad, is the lowest common denominator of marketing. Television, radio, and print media have long understood how to keep people serially "engaged" (consider the 'if it bleeds it leads' mentality of local news, or the emergence of 'angertainment' on CNN or FOX in the 90s and onwards).
But stimulating engagement is very different from actually controlling someone or altering their behavior in a way beyond "hey look at this interesting thing!". Consider that the click-through rate for Meta ads is on the order of ~1%, and this is literally their most valuable metric. They achieve this not by actually persuading people that an ad they don't care about is actually interesting (which to me would be the real acid test of whether they have 'fine control'), but rather by (a) effectively segmenting the audience in a way TV can't and (b) keeping the audience engaged long enough that maybe they click an ad. While they're no doubt good at both of these things, I think it's telling that the best these platforms have been able to do is the same strategy that every other form of mass media has also stumbled on: throw enough sensational crap your way that you stick around long enough to maybe click an ad.
To your point more directly: I agree that being able to agitate large groups of people in the same way is a dangerous ability, but I think it's also one that's very old and very common. It is not the unique provenance of 'algorithms', it's just the nature of mass media acting as a demagogue (look at role of newspapers in the lead-up to the Spanish-American war, for an example that predates our modern era). The way we challenge this is IMO not by treating the problem as something entirely new and overwhelmingly powerful ("big tech algorithms are mind control rays"), it's by looking at the historical record and recycling the strategies which have worked before (libel and slander laws, journalistic ethics, and trust-busting). Certainly there are elements of the problem which are new and unique , but from where I'm sitting the differences seem smaller than the similarities.
They can delegate or they can archive and choose not to use this data for anything other than the stated purpose.
Are they indirectly saying that they can't restrain themselves and that any data they collect for whatever reasons is fair game ?
I guess their problem is if someone submits identifying data willingly they will not be able to use it for other purposes without consent and they will look suspicious even when they infer the data/connections independently.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39822577
When I was growing up, there was basically just ICQ (predominantly chat, sparse text profile), then MSN (predominantly chat, sparse text profile with one or a few profile photos), then early MySpace where nobody was uploading their real identity. I think it would have been a shame to not have access to those types of networks. I met so many people through those types of networks.
The law could put a restriction only on the post-2005 type of social media which is about publishing a curated stream of life updates with one’s real identity in rich media (photos, videos). If you take that all of that out, there’s nothing to ‘like’ or compare yourself to.
I’m no lawyer and haven’t read the actual text, but if you have a platform where there are no accounts and everyone posts anonymously or under a pseudonym, like 4chan, it completely sidesteps this.
I already didn’t want a Facebook account just to see a businesses specials, now I’ll need to present ID too?
Certainly interested to see how all this plays out.
I think the point is that the internet and particularly social media is now the de-facto town square. States are basically requiring identification to speak or criticize government in the town square. If you take a step back and look at it that way, it's grossly anti-American.
Imagine back in the day, if you had any type of meeting/gathering to discuss anything that might be related to politics, and the police were there to collect everyone's Id. AA meetings, computer meetups, hobby gathering, HOA meetings, etc. This is essentially that, except on a computer. Just think of the children!
If anything, these services are more similar to shopping malls. And don’t be surprised when the mall cop throws you out for causing a scene, or just lounging about and not consuming enough.
2. The government doesn't tell mall cops what to do.
Also no one lives or eats or breathes on Twitter so the notion that they are exercising an online platform the same way they would exercise the park on Main Street does not follow.
Not to mention the fact that the entire point of the town square is that it is a place for discussion of the function of the polis with the citizenry of the polis. Online social media is a place to consume garbage from foreign actors and influencers.
That is true but unrelated to the DeSantis law. The social media companies obviously don't want to kick kids off their platform considering they are a significant portion of their audience.
The DeSantis law states the government is mandating that social media companies ID everybody. This does have precedent though because governments require bars and food marts to ID young people for cigarettes, but it's different because they are not required to ID everybody. I'm not sure they are even required to ID people, they can just be prosecuted for selling cigarettes and alcohol to minors. I think the ID part was just the most convenient way to not get prosecuted.
Of course requiring social media companies to ID everybody will have a massive chilling effect on political discourse. That might be part of the objective or at least a convenient side effect.
But online platforms are not like shopping malls, because online platforms sell advertiser access to a coherent speech product, which is distinct from the sale of goods in ways that profoundly affect first amendment protection of their business.
But the social media companies aren't the ones who want age verification and to kick people off their platforms, the government is. The companies want kids in their audience, kids want to be in their audience, many parents are fine with kids in their audience, it's the government of Florida who wants to ban kids.
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding but you seem to be arguing that social media companies should be allowed to kick people off their platforms, which would trump the individual's free speech. That isn't the issue here.
The reason why this argument is bad is that online social media platforms aren’t the public square. They’re not the public square because they are something else: a coherent speech product.
They are allowed to kick people off because they produce a coherent speech product.
But you are right, the fact that they are allowed to kick people off is not directly related to the fact the government wants to bar kids from using these sites.
Are you and I in full agreement now? I think we might be.
>the government can’t kick every kid off social media because social media is the public square and kicking people out of the public square is wrong.
I think kicking kids off isn't the primary complaint. I think that to enforce kicking kids off requires social media platforms to ID everyone to ensure they aren't kids. That's the chilling effect. Fewer people will post their true feelings (good or bad), which lessens citizen discourse (which IMO is bad).
>They’re not the public square because they are something else: a coherent speech product.
How do you define a coherent speech product and what makes it unable to also be a public square?
I'm not particularly rooting for this either. I am sympathetic that social media might be bad for kids, but this isn't the way
Even worse would happen if you left your 6 year old wonder around the town square unattended while you went to a movie.
The fact that the legislation is intended to affect kids is irrelevant if the only legally permitted way to comply damages the individual liberties of adults.
What? Where is this the case?
Firstly, try to approach children in the town square while wearing a mask for anonymity; or try to hold up images of porn in your town square. You will not be there long, you'd likely be detained, and you'd likely be asked for identification.
Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town square? I have lived in several large US cities and several small towns. In neither was there any sort of common place where we all congregated to address matters of the town. At best, there are city hall/city council meetings where the public can speak but at least in my town (and I know of many others), identification is required to prove that you live in the town!
Even the founding fathers, when writing under pseudonyms, understood that anonymity and circulation was incumbent upon them to maintain, not that they were entitled to it because "town square."
To address your last point: this is not simply some ill conceived moral panic/think of the children type moment. Go try to host - as an adult - an AA meeting or "computer meetup" with children that happens to be held in the local adult toy shop. See how well that goes for you. At this point, we know children are getting approached by adults at a large scale on instagram, we know children are getting exposed to a lot of adult content on twitter, and on the spectrum between innocent HOA meeting and damaging to society as a whole, its clearly more towards the latter.
Where is the majority of politics and recent events discussed? Where are new ideas shared and accepted or rejected? Where is this topic being discussed? Case rested.
>Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town square?
It's an international phenomenon, probably as old as civilizations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_square
The rest of your post sounds like moral panic.
You idea of the town square is also outdated. Do you think the municipal government in Rome still meets at the Forum? And you did not address my point that even if it did exist as it did in whatever millennium you yearn for, would the behavior that is present on the internet be tolerated the same way? Was the Forum or Copley or Dock square known for adult men showing their genitalia to underage women? Your idea of a town square is antiquated and likely would not have tolerated the behavior you think the internet should just because its the town square. Case rested.
> The rest of your post sounds like moral panic.
Nice rebuttal there. If it's just moral panic, why does the data suggest that social media use its detrimental to adolescents' mental health and well being? Why is the effort to curtail social media influence on kids' a bipartisan effort in an increasingly partisan society? Even the misguided level of libertarianism you're probably advocating for understands that short of pure anarchy, there are some externalities governments have to address, chief among them are social media platforms that are evidently harmful to certain parts of society (young kids). Case rested.
Cities and towns in the US were once often built around town squares. Many cities have open public areas like this in Europe and South America where people can congregate. Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires comes to mind. Cities in the US haven't been designed around a central town square in a long time, but the term has stuck colloquially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_de_Mayo
Below is a link to William Penn's original plan for Philadelphia, where the city would have a five town squares, with one in the center of each of four quadrants, and the largest in the city center. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gary-Libecap/publicatio...
https://lauriephillips.com/philadelphias-five-original-squar...
Boston long had a number of town squares, many of which no longer exist, such as Haymarket Square. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_Square_(Boston)
Furthermore, the behavior that was tolerated in the town square would not be close to what we tolerate online. And we don't afford kids the freedom in the real world that we do online. I am not sure why people think that requiring parental consent or age verification online is some sort of assault on personal liberty.
And requiring identification to lounge on the town square is generally considered unconstitutional in the U.S.
I don’t know how to square this circle. Can you conduct age verification without requiring identification?
We don't seem to have an issue with the government requiring businesses to check ID for alcohol, tobacco, porn (in the physical world), and firearms. Movie theaters check ID for rated R movies if you appear to be under 17. In fact, a lot of online retailers of alcohol and tobacco now require ID to be verified at purchase instead of at delivery.
Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/etc are not the digital town square; the most charitable analogy for them is they they are merchants in the town square. And the rules should still apply to them.
As to the other information, you're more making the case that online tracking should be illegal (which I'd agree with). For the majority of people, they are either unaware or uninformed about how to prevent online tracking to a sufficient degree. If you're signed into your Google and Facebook accounts and then surfing the web, theres a good chance you're getting caught up in cross site tracking. Hell, even if you don't have accounts explicitly, its not like Facebook isn't tracking non-users. In the real world, stalking is illegal.
Also, in my state (Washington), IDs now have barcodes on them. When I buy beer at the store, the clerk doesn't even look at my ID; he/she scans it and thats it. I'd hope the information about what type of beer and how often I buy it isn't being stored somewhere but I'm just hoping.
It also has conditions for which sites are affected by this law. The site has to have doomscroll and already be popular with kids. Google Maps isn't what they're targeting.
Honestly, mixed feelings. I'm in no rush to show Zuck my passport but the flagrant grooming comments on every kid's TikTok account is enough to show there's a significant problem, even if this isn't the right answer.
How do teenagers find and discover businesses when they are locked behind a sign up wall for social media?
That's like saying you go to Pornhub to buy Manscaped Hair Trimmers. You don't. They _advertise_ on PH, but that's not where you buy them at.
Why is everyone replying to me about ads? Who said anything about ads?
Why is this even a problem?
Oh no, businesses can’t target advertising directly at children?
This is about businesses using Facebook as their main website. Where do ads come in?
Are teenagers not real people or something? They don't buy things or shop?
And with some simple div removal, IG doesnt require a login to view content. This is true about a lot of the paywalled sites.
edit: https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/tech/twitter-public-access-re...
> People without a Twitter account or who weren’t logged in used to be able to scroll the platform’s homepage and view public accounts and tweets. But as of this week, when such a user opens the platform they are met with a screen prompting them to sign up or sign in to Twitter.
from 2021: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/pa6dra/twitter... and from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615371
I think the barrier to entry with creating a new account on each site right now is low when no ID is required - so social media sites lock everything down.
With the new friction of requiring ID, it could be harder to get users to create accounts so locking down everything won't make sense from a viewership access perspective.
The bill summary on the Florida senate webpage says:
> Such commercial entities must verify, using either an anonymous or standard age verification method, that the age of a person attempting to access the material harmful to minors satisfies the bill’s age requirements.
It sounds to me like “anonymous age verification method” could just mean that the website asks how old you are? What constitutes verification here? That sentence makes it sound like they can choose to use whatever feeble method they want.
At face value this law seems like political points being scored by passing a widely popular law that changes very little in practice (bumping the minimum age from 13 to 14).
That doesn't sound very anonymous to me
Bars do it by having you show an id.
Online pot dispensaries do it by having you upload an id.
Texas expects porn sites to do it by having you upload an id.
How does Florida expect a site to do it?
This is a legitimate question that I want the answer to. Presumably "check this box" isn't going to cut it. So if it's not the most common way to enforce an actual legal restriction, then what is it?
Parental control software picks up on that. [1]
Social media could do the same thing: make a social media adults-only meta tag for parental control software to use.
For the parents that care, and use parental control software, the ID laws won't stop their kids running into porn. The porn their kids are going to encounter is going to be on non-porn sites like twitter or reddit (or small sites that don't care about these laws anyway).
Maybe we needed a bigger push for more awareness or better parental control software but the ID law push is weird and unamerican to me.
[1] https://www.rtalabel.org/
That's client side. This law specifically makes this a server-side issue; the service cannot let a minor make an account.
How do you do that without ID?
I'm a parent I have parent controls setup on my child's devices but it's very hard to dial it in properly and cover all the bases. It should be far more straight forward to manage than it is now.
I'm obviously pretty tech savvy and I would say 99% of parents are not going to get this right.
Microsoft's parental controls are sort of ok. I also have separate control software for Windows and I have controls at the router. Of course, none of things can talk to each other to create a coordinated plan (say giving X number of screen time hours per day).
Besides the easiest way to know what you kid is doing online is to watch them -- much easier to do if I control when they use it.
I do disagree that a technical solution could have avoided laws like Texas. It’s not about “protecting the children”. It’s never about the children. It’s just censorship. It’s just easier to go after a porn site than it is a library.
Get informed.
I'm not asked for ID when I order a drink. The bartender takes a look at my ugly mug and makes the call: I'm [painfully] clearly over 25.
Facebook has more than enough processing power to have an AI watch you reading a script straight to camera for 30 seconds to work out a rough age. If you're within 5 years of their idea of 18, surrender that ID, the same way you would if you were in a bar. Don't want to? Don't maintain a social media account. Don't have that drink.
The alternative is setting up a government-maintained 0Auth-style hand-off. They know who you are. The social media site could open a verification ticket, you authenticate with your government and they sign your ticket without the social media site getting any of your details. The trade-off with that is cost and your government now knows you're on TikTok. For some people that last one matters.
If you paired these laws with strong PII protection (see GDPR) to stop social media sites storing this stuff indefinitely, using your data against you, it might be an easier sell.
You have a bit more faith in a technical solution working at scale than I do, but I have to point out, that after repeatedly claiming that no one wanted an ID scan, your proposal involves an ID scan.
I also have to point out, that PII and GDPR protections are meaningless here. Under a government mandated censorship regime, the threat is the government, not some data broker somewhere.
They have innumerable GPU cycles they could redirect to a ML solution, and more importantly this is something that ML and facial recognition systems have been doing in prosumer-grade hardware for well over a decade. If I could set something up to do this in an afternoon, I believe Facebook probably could too.
My proposal only involves ID if you look young enough that the AI isn't certain or you don't want to upload a video. It's cutting out ID checks for 99% over 25yo.
But I do see this more about child safety than a censorship regime. Social networks are poison, even to adults. They're designed to trap us there, keep up "engaging" and not wander off to another platform. Our ability to make an informed choice about whether our kids are being damaged by them (and the people on them - who we have no control over) is seriously diminished. I've seen the stuff my daughters' 8yo friend uploads and the comments would change your mind. Yes, I'm biased, but I don't think that makes me (or this) wrong.
Do you have another method to prove age? One that doesn't require ID, and can be implemented as of today?
Emphasis mine. It's that that which I'm disputing.
This law does not require you to have an account to go onto a website. It is a law that requires you are age-checked to hold an account on social media platforms. These are different things.
Holding an account —broadly speaking— allows you to post, like, comment, follow and be profiled in an enduring fashion. Some of these can have life-long implications that 12 year olds aren't equipped to evaluate. How many adults can identify unhealthy social media usage and do something to stop it?
I don't know how age verification will work in practice. Checking a government ID is one way but if you're handing that off to a third party service, it's expensive. They don't need to know who you are for certain. A similar check is when you buy alcohol. If you look young, you're asked for ID.
When I buy alcohol, I'm not because I look like a man with kids nearing his forties. It would be far cheaper for Facebook to have an AI watch a video of you speaking to camera, with ID as a fallback. Many social media platforms are ingesting gigabytes of our faces every day so. They probably already know the rough ages of their users.
But going on a website (eg Youtube) doesn't require you have a profile. Going on Facebook business pages doesn't require it. If anything, laws like this might mean that things like Instagram have to be more open to preserve their reach. Not a bad outcome, IMO.
And is AI the new blockchain that will magically solve every problem? And most children over 14 don’t have government IDs either.
If you don’t want your kids to be on Facebook, use parental controls. It’s the parents responsibility.
I live in Florida for context. The same government officials talk out of the left side of their mouths about “parental choice” and now this law says children can’t be on social media even with parental consent.
You don't know how much their child is being affected by platforms that have been designed to be addictive, that go out of their way to spur conflict and argument (sorry, "engagement"), and that have so few parental controls that it's near impossible for a parent to actually vet what's going on, who's interacting with them.
You're not even allowed to give your kids alcohol. There's clearly some precedence for protecting kids from their parents' inability to make informed choices.
And ML models for detecting age have existed for a long time. It's not magic unicorn dust. It's just one way to avoid this ID stuff that everybody is upset about.
But would you be okay if I used that same argument about why open computing platforms are bad because adults don’t know enough about computers to avoid malware and ransomware?
There have been cases where the cops arrested someone for criticizing them on Facebook
https://theconversation.com/mocking-the-police-got-an-ohio-m...
The cops also raided a newspaper for criticizing them
https://kansasreflector.com/2023/08/12/in-marion-county-news...
We have to be free to criticize the government anonymously
For reference: https://flsenate.gov/session/bill/2024/3/billtext/er/pdf
The Texas porn law similarly required no records be retained, with pretty steep penalties ($10k per record) for noncompliance.
And I should have to do that as a 50 year old guy with grown kids for “the children”?
How about if parents are concerned about their kids, they should use the parental controls that are already available.
And this isn’t theoretical for me. I live in Florida.
Registration and access maintained at the county level or smaller so that community standards and relationships shape adoption and use.
Low age cutoff with actual adults trying to connect put in jail and on a list.
so...everyone - that Facebook or whatever considers to be in Florida - has to provide ID to post, then?
It's more that having a website never became a thing for many businesses in the first place. 30 years ago they might have had a listing in the phone book. Nowadays that kind of business might have a facebook page, or more recently an instagram account. Creating a website (even with something like wix) requires a level of skill and effort above that.
I’ve seen a lot who are still paying for a site but rarely bother to update it. All the traffic’s on Facebook.
If you don't like it, that's your problem, not theirs. You're part of a small enough group they don't care about. I'm not sure how that's an age question in the first place, though. The "being run by millenials" throwaway by GP is just... well, at best, sloppy thinking.
There are GenZ businesses websiting, there are boomers insta-ing. You pick the tool for your niche.
All the information is already on google maps and IG/Facebook.
They have 2-3 billion people in their target audience.
And the point isn't if Wix is hard or not. It's that they answered the question "where do we need to advertise" for themselves, and just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's wrong.
Facebook is more generous.
Regardless, I won't bemoan the demise of either business. We need something simpler to drive traffic.
I agree, but I think your problem isn't Zuck, it's with passports.
Government issued licences aren't fit for purpose any more. They were when all you did with your paper drivers licence is show it to the police, but now they've become a form of ID you show man+dog who gets to scrape a whole pile of into from it that can be used to track you. For example, they can follow your passport number or drivers licence to connect a series of what should look like unrelated transactions.
As an example, now when a car rental company wants to know you have a valid licence they demand a copy of it. If you have an accident they use the copy to prove they verified you are licenced to drive, if you do something illegal they can hand over your ID so the police can chase you down. FIDO / WebAuthn / PassKey shows how those things can be achieved without leaking all the information on the licence. It can hand over a one time token saying you have a valid licence and signed by something that chains back to a public key held by the government. The token reveals nothing more than that to the car hire firm, but should they hand it over to the police they can decrypt it to identify you.
These tokens are useless if stolen. They can't link you to other transactions and don't identify you in any way, and yet are far more secure than a bunch of unsigned pixels. In other words unlike a copy of a passport, mostly harmless.
That's a critical flaw to those in power.
I can't help but feel your argument is with data protection [and the broad lack of it in the US] rather than government-held databases.
I have a couple of online government authentication methods. There could easily be an AVS API where a website kicks me off to to my government, and they sign a request for age verification, all with very little cost and fuss. That obviously causes uproar from people who think my government doesn't suspect I touch myself when they're not looking.
And a suggestion I've made in a couple of other sibling threads is having an AI watch you reading a script in realtime. I had to do this for a mortgage application a few years ago. Probably cheaper than a government API, and a high success rate on 25yo+ similar to facial-only checking in bars.
It goes deeper than that. Recently in Australia we've had two data breaches, one from a Telco [0] and another from a credit card company [1]. Both were required to collect ID by law, so they gave you a portal to upload photos of drivers licences, government medical insurance cards, credit card and so on. In both cases they leaked the lot.
To say they were unpopular was an understatement. Perhaps 10% of Australia had to get new drivers licences. The were hauled up to front senate committees, CEO's fell on the sword. A lot of political theatre in other words, but while this "take a copy of a government licence as a form of ID" madness continues it will keep happening.
In other news, social hacks against the government electronic ID for their website were used to collect around 1/2 a billion in fraudulent payouts (tax refunds and the like) [2]. And a few years ago the tax office was done for $2B or so for ID fraud waged against our VAT collection. [3] That one was perpetrated by thousands; the instructions went viral on TikTok.
We live in a digital world now, where it's easy to take a copy of any bag of bits. Relying on ID's that don't mutually authenticate and vigorously protect the information they do hand out is downright dangerous.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Optus_data_breach
[1] https://asic.gov.au/about-asic/news-centre/news-items/guidan...
[2] https://theconversation.com/the-500-million-ato-fraud-highli...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/13/ato-s...
Hopefully this will make that problem less prevalent.
I'm all for a healthy skepticism of government intervention, but my feeling is let's let Florida try this out and see what happens.
If anything is detrimental to the health of a child, it's a restricted worldview.
2) Verifier records the fact that the owner of {{account ID}} has proven they are of the age of majority. They throw away all other identifying information, including their exact age.
3) The individual logs in to Verifier from Social Media. Verifier certifies to Social Media that the individual is over the age of majority.
There's no technical barrier preventing this outcome, and if you read the text of the law this is very clearly what the legislature envisions. Will it work? I don't know. Let's wait and see.
It only becomes a problem if stores are forced to store the ID and link it to the token in some way.
not only that, but i fully believe that kids are WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY to impressionable and influenceable. there is a reason kids can't do a lot of things until 18 (even through the brain doesn't fully develop till 25). kids should not be influenced by social media to be doing permanent things that could harm themselves (like gender transitioning, getting a tatoo or piercing, or doing something dangerous challege) or their future careers (like breaking the law so they have a criminal record).
honestly social media is a wonderful thing, but something has to be done. i personally believe that parents need to have more power in discipling their children. i don't like the fact that laws like this have to be created, but i see that they have to exists with the more power they take away from the parents.
I went to school just at the cusp of digital bullying. A yahoo group was set up specifically to bully one kid in my class. It was shut down by yahoo, but I think because it was hosting porn, not because it was mostly designed for bullying people.
This was in the days of shared computers, and no real notifications. Now the bully is in your pocket.
I don't know what the equitable answer is. out right banning is wrong. But we do need to significantly more to allow people to escape bullying.