I am against these age bans because I know the mechanisms behind it will be used against everybody.
I am, however, all for banning personalised feeds, data collection, targeted ads, what amounts slot machines, and generally the poison these platforms spew.
What this will look like in practice I don't know. I am neither a lawyer, politician, nor do I work on these systems.
This is just banning social media with one extra step, these apps are virtually useless without personalization and their economy relies on it. I'm all for banning these platforms, we're all hooked on them and we need a hard ban, I know it won't happen but it's the only way.
Personalised is too vague of a term. IMO what destroyed social media was ending the chronological friends feed. When social media stopped being photos from your friends and family and started becoming endless content creator posts and ragebait.
Social media should not show any posts from people you haven’t friended.
You could make social media based on anonymous queries without personalization or likes. It wouldn't be useless, it would just be unrecognizable as social media.
Yeah, tbh I want more personalization in that I want posts from my friends, not clickbait the algorithm has decided I'm interested in because people who engage with this also engage with that...
Instagram (at least in europe) already provides this feature as they have to. Problem is you need to specifically adjust your feed every time you open the app, which makes it kind of useless against the addictive nature of it.
Banning smoking in public areas is great, though there is (slight) nuance in how bad smoking is depending on ingredients used. Some organic red wine every now and then depending on the individual can be totally fine and possibly beneficial. People binge drinking is terrible for culture.
But banning meat? That is just completely ridiculous. I would 100% agree that factory farming has to stop, as it's damaging to our environment, our animal friends, and ourselves even. But the reality is that (nearly all) humans need meat to thrive. No need to eat it every single day, but definitely a good idea to eat tons of it in general (including fish). This can and should be done in a more sustainable way: regenerative farming.
And just to point it out: vegetable farming is not a holy grail that could even solve this problem. Many would become weak, ill and possibly unfertile.
I am completely on the fence regarding these age bans. On one hand you are correct, but on the other hand consider that what’s lost is something most of us probably could live without. I am putting both social media and porn into that bucket.
The more I think about it the less and less difference I see between social media and porn.
In our liberatarian paradise where everything is ads and poison because of the ruthless aim of maximizing profit, the biggest enemy is heavy regulation from to some other body that is not a for-profit entity, be it a moral and spiritual guidance of a church or lifestyle or a strong government apparatus that is true to it's aim to improve the lives of it's citizens.
I marketed on FB before ads, our first client at the social agency I worked at in 08 was nature made supplements. It was fun and interesting at the beginning, then ads rolled in and I got out of it. It turned into something like the neighborhood swimming pool where everyone was swimming in each other's... I could see it and feel it.
Since about 2012 or so I was dreaming of a simple law or something on the books that banned ads in algorithmic feeds. It would be a really easy way to stop us from getting where we are today. It certainly would have slowed down the walled gardens and shittification of the internet.
I deal with teenagers that are on this stuff now and it's a fight, constantly. They hate hearing me go on about it.
What do yall think of Snapchat b.c we just caved and let my daughter use it.
> I deal with teenagers that are on this stuff now and it's a fight, constantly. They hate hearing me go on about it.
It's an almost daily topic of conversation with my 13 yr old, who doesn't have social media (answering "but why, dad" for the 1000th time). Exhausting.
I live with my older in laws and it’s not just affecting the younger generation. The older generation will also happily doom scroll whatever slop the algorithm feeds them. Usually not uplifting stuff…
Facebook is -literally- old people, screaming at each other.
Younger folks find this horrifying, and no longer use Facebook.
But older folks have more money. It’s just that, traditionally, older folks have been harder to manipulate through advertising, so advertisers generally target younger folks, who are more receptive to the kind of emotional games played by advertisers.
Facebook, however, is a goldmine, because it can affect older folks, like advertisers can affect younger generations.
I feel that the younger generation is much more cynical, and less responsive to media manipulation, than people give them credit for.
As an older person, though, I see my peers being led around like a dog at Westminster. It’s kind of embarrassing, frankly.
This is the way! Age verification will expand, to include ban on VPN:s and eventually into total surveillance, and then we'll be slaves of the state, instead of to social media.
I'd much rathar have social media and not be a slave to the state.
I'm against all those things as well but placing a ban on them is the same mechanism as banning anything. People should have the freedom to do things we disagree with. I haven't used social media (other than HN if it counts as one) for almost 20 years. I think they're toxic and a waste of time. But that doesn't mean other people shouldn't be allowed to use them. If people want to watch brainrot all day its they're life and I have no say in that. This is so my own personal freedom is preserved.
You can't have freedom if a few people have a microphone that reaches hundreds of millions of people have zero responsibilities for how they use that microphone.
If you actually haven't used social media recently then I get why you'd be confused, because back in the day Facebook had a chronological timeline of people you specifically added in. The way a modern social media recommender algorithms work is completely different. If you, for example, say "I want to hear everything that Bob has to say" by "subscribing" to Bob or whatever, you "might" see when Bob says something, or instead you "might" see Mary's post from the other side of the world that has some strangely aggressive opinions about someone the billionaire platform owner happens to hate.
Social media companies have decided by buddying up to the US administration that they get to decide what everyone around you sees or hears. If a couple of billionaires decide that they don't like phyzix5761 you might just get lynched by an angry mob. That's not gonna do much for your freedom, in-fact it's kind of the opposite.
It is easy to say that we shouldn't limit what a person is allowed to do. That a person should be allowed to use their free will. That sounds nice because nobody want to be controlled by anyone else. But let's turn it upside down and instead say that we disallow companies from doing certain things.
- Instead of saying that a person may not install unsafe wall sockets, we can say that companies are not allowed to sell unsafe wall sockets.
- Instead of saying that a person may not take any job they like, we can say that companies must provide workplace safety.
- Instead of saying that people are not allowed to smoke or use social media, we can say that companies are not allowed to sell addictive products.
So it is a question of perspective where both viewpoints are valid.
And of course addictive is a scale from nicotine to deep fried chicken to infinite scroll. And then it is a question about the customer's ability to see through and make rational choices which of course depend on age, knowledge, existing alternatives etc. It is not that easy for a teenager to resist the works of thousands of engineers and data statisticians who are working on increasing retention.
So just saying that it should be allowed because of Free Will is to ignore all the complexities around it.
I wouldn't want my child to access social media but when we say we want to ban all children from accessing these things we're effectively saying we know better than their own parents. Its a sense of superiority that drives these regulatory policies where we believe parents are not knowledgeable or capable enough to make decisions for their own kids.
This is a dangerous mindset and precedent. It means that one day someone else will come along and have the ability to tell us what we can and can't do with our own children. If the next administration thinks it must be mandatory for every child to participate in social media for 4 hours every day now they have the legal and social precedent to impose something like that.
We shouldn't use government to force our own ideas and beliefs on others. Instead, we should set up boundaries that allow each individual to freely choose what they want for themselves and their families as long as it doesn't directly harm the freedoms of others.
I agree. I’d much rather if we simply banned personalised algorithmic feeds, for everyone. They’re the new smoking. They’re toxic to mental health and to society more broadly. They’re no good for adults or children - so no need for age checks for any of it.
YouTube and Facebook could still work. Just show the channels I’m subscribed to instead of whatever an AI thinks will drive me toward addiction. Even YouTube’s recommended “watch next” could survive. They’d just have to base the recommendations on what the viewer population as a whole enjoy instead of putting me personally in a bubble.
The personalised feeds is the whole point of their reason of being. No personalisation no profits. There just isn't a world where these huge companies can exist without personalised feeds. Meta platforms as well as YT would die and you would have instead something like Nebula which you pay for like Netflix but offers content creators content. Most people wouldn't pay for Nebula and so, you are back to the original point. People would put pressure to restore personalised feeds. Everyone supports these bans until they are the target of them.
This isn't a technological problem but a human one. The fundamental problem is that we haven't developed generalisable, scalable and profitable business models on the internet that aren't toxic.
Not true. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were all successful products before they added personalised algorithmic feeds. Facebook just showed you everything by your friends. Twitter showed your follows (like bsky) and YouTube showed your channels.
The personalised algorithmic junk came later. It was never required for the websites to be wildly popular.
The tech isn’t that expensive or complex. Email didn’t have to add all this junk to be sustainable.
Something like the original Facebook where it’s just posts from your direct friends and no public content would be sustainable. It just wouldn’t make a trillion dollar company.
Well, one example is the "are you a bot check". If you don't give out your age and let the provider verify that, you are banned from using the internet.
Thse are new "freedoms" we are going to enjoy in a little while.
But from first hand, I grew up on social media and I can’t say it was really positive for me or the people around me that also grew up on/with social media.
I’m wondering how this would change mental health in young people. Can anyone point me to specific studies on this?
Personally I believe that our communities and mental health deteriorate through social media especially in a young age.
Although I am a firm believer of the above, I do not believe that Governments are doing it because they do care about our health.
Quite the opposite. I believe they want to manipulate us as much as they can so they can keep in power.
Although they want that, they have seen that social media has the power on gathering people and creating protests, so I believe they want to cut it off on younger people that usually have way more anger and got much less to lose (nowadays that the light at the end of the tunnel is fading) than a middle-aged man being mind-controlled his whole life being a good abiding citizen.
Its a power tool, they are just swinging it where they want. Soonish in EU we'll have the same ban, but it won't be because EU politicians cares about children, it is so they can keep their power and not have a generation that has access to other sources than traditional media and structured schools grooming them on just obeing their masters.
Are political revolutions really brought about by children under 16? I think there's an argument that these policies push for identifying adults and that that might stifle speaking out, but I don't think any of it would be about stifling uprising from 15 year olds.
And when you speak of governments doing this to stay in power: which governments? All political parties in general? Just typical old-school politicians? Because there's a fairly atypical leader in the US, and there's an atypical rising force in Australia, and so on, and I think their popularity is stronger in older age brackets than aforementioned 15 year old.
>the disinformation you see on social media about subjects like vaccines.
Governments produced far more disinformation about vaccines than social media, like claiming the covid vaccines reduced transmission when the studies behind them never claimed that and the actual data showed that clearly wasn't the case.
The Anxious Generation is a recent book that extensively explains the damage caused by social media before age 16. The arguments in the book would support such a ban if it manages to get the majority of kids off social media, but it has to be a critical mass and not easily evadable
One issue with this is that it's a non-peer-reviewed critique of a peer-reviewed scientific article. It's of course still possible that the critique is correct and the article is wrong. However, you'd need to deeply understand this critique, and be at least as qualified as the reviewers to be able to convince yourself of that (or have a good reason to believe the reviewers deliberately accepted a flawed paper). Am I missing something?
Yet like cigarettes or lead you're not prepared to be very careful about results that claim it's all a moral panic being favourable to a very rich elite.
I’ve given this a lot of thought as well and I’m also generally a little unsure, especially because the Internet was so positive for me in most other ways (it’s hard to overstate what battle.net communities did for my psychology and confidence as somebody who felt kind of alone) but I think what ultimately distinguishes the current harm of social media is that what we had back then was not nearly as sophisticated. Yes I’m sure they were getting some data from us, yes there was exploitation and problems, But the current infrastructure of the “attention economy” is absolutely insane and beyond destructive.
From a social perspective, it wasn’t really until Instagram blew up in popularity and we had to start learning not to take people’s feeds as representative of how great their lives were that this stuff started to creep up. IMO Facebook was a little more text driven and myspace was mostly just middle school drama that would’ve taken place IRL anyway.
I get your opinion on networks like battle.net. These also did wonders for me as a person and getting me into IT in the first place, got me connected with people double my age who just taught me valuable lessons on teamwork and growing up.
With my comment I was looking more into the direction of "the social media", where everything seems fake. I luckily grew up, when everything was still based on an actual timeline and not a deeply optimized algorithm.
Yeah I think I kind of accidentally conflated some stuff in that comment. I’m more just broadening out - social media is particularly harmful, but there are parts of the Internet outside of social media that are also not great.
I think that comment about sophistication is absolutely key. Not even just data harvesting, but actively working against the interests of a user to keep them actively engaged.
Yeah it’s just such an overall hostile experience where you have to have your guard up. Which crazy to me is how many people on HN still say that having an ad blocker is selfish/“people just wanting stuff for free.” An ad blocker is basic security at this point.
This is separate from mandating age verification onto everyone.
Personally I don't really care as to whether social media is banned or not, though I also don't think state actors should even be able to restrict us. However had, when it comes to age sniffing, I fail to see why I should yield my personal data, in order to access information on the www. This kind of defeats the purpose of www if a state can restrict us here (any state - not surprising in a dictatorship, but odd in a democracy).
This concerted global effort is more about building the surveillance infrastructure for the web that will be required given AI's takeoff, and less-so about the well being of children.
But I think the conversation people aren't having is the reverse of this: when is it time to ban people over, say, 65 from social media? They're often victims of scams and propaganda bot farms.
What do we do about adult radicalization on the Internet?
I'm about as cynical and open to conspiracy as anybody, but I strongly disagree on this one. Social media is a cancer on society as a whole, let alone children who are still trying to figure out who they are. It serves absolutely no positive purpose that couldn't be done at least as well through private chat groups and the like.
I will absolutely be barring my children from social media. I fully expect them to use it or similar sorts of stuff behind my back, but that's okay. It will then be hidden and scarce, which limits the overall negative consequences it can have. Being in a country where this is enforced at a national level is extremely appealing to me.
> I will absolutely be barring my children from [drugs]. I fully expect them to use it or similar sorts of stuff behind my back, but that's okay. It will then be hidden and scarce, which limits the overall negative consequences it can have.
If you make a simple substitution, it becomes clear that "limits the overall negative consequences it can have" in no way logically follows from "behind my back" and "it will then be hidden". Draconian bans are, simply put, extremely lazy parenting, and not only lazy, but ineffectual. All the more so when it's something as relatively innocuous as social media, where your children will be actively shunned by their peers and come to resent you while still finding ways to use it. If you want good outcomes for your children, play an active role in their life and guide them positively instead of thinking you can just say "don't do X" and that will magically be the end of all problems.
In a country where it is banned, there will be no 'normal' social pressure to use it. There might be some fringe pressure to use it, akin to drugs in countries where such is banned, except probably far less. Drugs are at least enjoyable, while basically everybody rates social media as a cancer - especially children, yet they continue to use it through a mixture of addiction and learned dependence.
And no the effects are not "relatively innocuous." It's having a catastrophically negative effect on children, especially girls. Rather than cherry picking one of the zillion studies to support this I'll just link to a search [1], because the evidence is not ambiguous.
Cigarettes were banned for children and are extremely unenjoyable and yet there was still tremendous social pressure to smoke them (before vaping became cooler). I think that plenty of people clearly enjoy social media, meanwhile. Social media is much like alcohol - not so toxic in responsible dosages, but susceptible to abuse. Even if you don't like social media, it's borderline mandatory to use it in order to form social connections when everyone else is using it. Perhaps that's not a concern for an adult of child-rearing age, who already has their social network established and can snub their nose at social media, but I believe it would be profoundly damaging to a child's social development in this day and age.
Psychology, incidentally, is a completely bunk field of fake science, with somewhere between 2/3rds and 3/4ths of papers being unreplicable. I am highly amenable to applying research and statistics to inform decision-making, but it does you no good if you're using faulty research and statistics. Using the 'authority' of a bad field as a bludgeon to avoid actually making your argument is not compelling. I suggest articulating a case yourself rather than reaching for an article dump as though it proves you objectively correct, unless your goal is simply to reinforce your own biases and assure yourself of the correctness of your decisions, their actual correctness be damned.
Also, I'd note there's kind of two different points of discussion here. One is "banning it for my child even though it's legal" and one is a "national ban". Even if you support the latter and believe it would have a positive outcome, that does not mean it will necessarily have a positive outcome to still ban your children when all of their peers are definitely using it. As far as I see it, a national ban is a complete non-starter for positive outcomes because, regardless of whether it has or doesn't have a positive outcome on a child's social environment, for it to be enforceable requires acceding to a surveillance state in which internet usage is directly tied to your government ID, at which point the negative outcomes for society outweigh any possible positive outcome for children by 100 to 1. You do not want to give government complete and total control of the means of communication, I promise you. Even if you trust your current government to not abuse it, once they have that control it's never becoming undone, so you must also trust that every future government in your and your children's lifetimes will also not abuse the uncontrolled power they've been given -- and if you have that level of unconditional trust in any society, I have a mighty fine bridge to sell you, a real beauty it is.
You're basically saying that you will simply reject all evidence to the contrary of your own personal opinion which is supported by absolutely nothing, contradicted by essentially all evidence that we do have, and is completely out of touch with reality. Cigarette bans were highly effective. Even prior to vaping cigarettes were basically dead. The CDC gives current total tobacco use at 5-10% and it's certainly not the 'cool kids', but moreso the weirdos. [1] They certainly have influence in their own tiny cliques, but that's nothing like "tremendous social pressure."
And as an aside, the whole point of me linking to a search of all studies that the results are not only replicable, but universal. Social media is just horrible for society, especially children, everywhere.
> your own personal opinion which is supported by absolutely nothing,
My personal opinion is supported by life experiences and rational thinking. If all you can do is outsource your thoughts to other people with a 75% miss rate, of which 25% of studies came to the opposite effect when attempted to be replicated, you are simply a tool to be used by propagandists. Let's not forget that psychology is a field that is as likely to find a consistent effect for psychic powers - literal psychic powers - as it is anything else[1]. Those studies are not 'evidence' of anything. The bar is on the floor when it comes to the level of scientific rigor exhibited in the field.
The overwhelming majority of people, independent of political ideology, support banning social media for children. [1] That's just a random poll - you can find a ton, they all say the same thing, and pretty much everywhere across the world. Seeing a conspiracy or ulterior motive with politicians doing something that the overwhelming majority of people want speaks to the state of modern governance and governments, but is nonetheless unjustified.
What is it about magically turning 17 that makes social media "safe"?
If these laws were about integrity in social media, there would be disclosure laws for paid time or content creation, disclosure of who pays for ads or time of creators. This would equally protect adults and kids instead of dubious age laws
Nothing. It's a cancer on all of society, but modern societies generally agree that it's desirable to engage in a reasonable standard of protection for children while also allowing adults to engage in vice or undesirable behaviors if they so desire.
Social media now is very different from social media 10 years ago. Back then it was about social interaction with friend, peers, now it's about advertisement, maximizing engagement.
"Algorithms that track user engagement to prioritize what is shown tend to favor content that spurs negative emotions like anger and outrage. Overall, most online misinformation originates from a small minority of “superspreaders,” but social media amplifies their reach and influence."
>Social media is a cancer on society as a whole, let alone children who are still trying to figure out who they are. It serves absolutely no positive purpose that couldn't be done at least as well through private chat groups and the like.
Social media provides decentralized information transmission, so people (kids are people) are able to obtain information without it first being filtered through a small cabal of self-interested media corporations and governments. If there was no social media, the Iran war would probably have overwhelming popular support like the Iraq one and there'd already be US boots on the ground.
There isn't US boots on the ground because that would be absolute suicide, have you followed anything that's been going on? It is an asymmetric war they cannot win.
And yes "decentralised" meaning we have personal echo-chambers or a swarm of Elon sycophant accounts with inflated number of views and bots mass liking each extremist post. LLMs are going to put astroturfing campaigns on steroids.
The way how corporations like Meta implemented modern social medias filter information as well. It does it in a different way than TV, but personalized information bubbles are important arguments again using "social" medias.
Except all major social media sites are also corporations with their own interests. I'd rather the business model of traditional media that rides on journalistic reputation to a recommendation feed where the only job of it is to keep you on the site, especially when said feed can easily be manipulated.
No media organisation is perfect but your description of social media as some nirvana of decentralised truth is very questionable.
In many countries, targeted ads aren’t allowed for kids. By forcing age verification, companies in the targeted ads business (like Meta) can shift liability away from themselves and rely on forced identity verification done by someone else. It means they get to advertise a whole lot more, since they can blindly trust the verification instead of having to be on the side of caution and advertise less.
This is why they have lobbied many states in America for age verification laws, and are the alleged main funding source for the campaigns trying to make this about child safety when it’s about their profits. And the governments support it because it means they can identify people online and suppress speech. It’s literally the fascist notion of merging corporate power and authoritarian government power.
I mean none of the big social networks have any privacy anyways, they can exactly pinpoint who you are. I'm ok with this additional verification since no privacy is being lost really. No real politically endangered group is going to communicate via these networks anyways.
But this further ensures that that cannot be changed in the future.
I think we lost this fight about 2-3 decades ago, when we sacrificed privacy for free stuff, mainly because the environment wasn’t this hostile yet. However, these additional steps in the wrong direction doesn’t help at all, but I also think that nobody will get any new information with these nowadays.
It's a privilege for these tech companies to operate in these nations, not a right.
If they can't demonstrate positive value, then countries are absolutely right to cut out a cancer.
I'm hugely in favour of more regulation with more revenue/users. If my income tax scales, so should the penalties associated their wealth extraction models. Ideally these big tech firms should be eliminating all the negative externalities associated with their use, either through funding systems, or a direct tax on revenue.
The privacy side is worrying, but does Meta, Google, etc products are the antithesis of privacy anyway. Anything which burns their model and ideologies to the ground is a welcome change. As long as these draconian regulations only impact the hugest companies who don't demonstrate positive value, I think it's ok. If they start coming for smaller sites, message boards, etc, then it's a problem.
The list is pretty small, so I wonder if this just drives users to other, smaller platforms. That said, the list of platforms includes all the biggest offenders of engagement optimization, so it feels more like a ban of addictive social media than all social media in general. But it's also interesting they ban messaging apps, which I assume parents use to keep contact with their kids.
So we're all going to accept mass survaliance for everybody who is >=16 in order to "protect" those who are under 16. Yet parents wont get any notices if their child bypasses the id check.
Social media is inherently mass surveillance, or at least that's the narrative the big companies themselves sell to those who want ad slots in order to justify the prices they charge.
I think the term 'social media' has outlived its purpose. It's too vague to be used in discussion. 'Social' seems a bit redundant, as isn't most media inherently social?
It's quite a nice, flattering term for these companies. They get to advertise their platforms as being 'social' (bringing people closer together, having firneds), and 'media' (wow look at all these fun, cool pics and videos!), when in reality, it's kinda the opposite.
I think we need to start naming things based on who actually owns these companies, the essence of their operations, and where they generate the most of their revenues from. Ad Platforms? Surveillance Boards?
Creating accounts should be allowed, but using an account could require age check.
People should be able to create an account at birth. Then when they grow up, they are ready to use the account. This way proves that the account owner is at least as old as the account.
Like banning the sale of nicotine products to under-16s, it won't be a perfect solution as a few will continue to work around the restriction, but it's a huge step in the right direction.
I like this. I'm just worried that it's going to make it way harder to create new independent small websites, if the webmasters have to check their users' age.
Well no-one said they have to implement it themselves. I'm sure Google and Apple are willing to send a hardware-signed attestation that the device owner is 18+ if required bu the state.
I think this is by design. I think small independent new websites will cease to exist.
I'm generally supportive of bans like this, but I don't want it to come at the expense of the privacy of adult users. I fear this is the way we're going in the west.
There is nothing social about social media as it exists today. The social component was meant to be socialising with friends and like-minded individuals. As it exists it is at best parasocial media. Realistically its simply a funnel for content from creators, and the ads that leech onto said content.
> The social component was meant to be socialising with friends and like-minded individuals.
That still exists. I know people who mostly use just that part and don't like to doomscroll. I also personally connected to new people through socials and these friendships are pretty strong.
Social media today is just designed to induce a zombie state where you sit for hours scrolling short form video and adverts. If it was destroyed entirely society would be better off.
I've got four children ranging from 11 to 33. All of them digital native, all of them had no restrictions whatsoever on gadgets and online at all. All grew up to become good and successful people.
I will do everything in my power to keep my youngest connected to all the social networks he wants and I will not take those legal requirements into consideration.
Out of curiosity, how difficult (from reasonably expensive to impossibly expensive) would it be to build a second internet for children, completely disconnected from what we'd call the adult internet?
If we're going toward this highly curated model, which I'm not against, I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet.
It might be a good business (like youtube for kids) but would it actually be good for kids? They should go outside with their friends, and people in the tech industry should stay away from them. Allegedly good intentions ("help you stay in touch with your friends") will eventually turn into what it always turns into.
Nothing is universally good for kids in too big quantities, but I think this approach would be less bad than any other approach to the moral panic around social media.
I would never let my kids access YouTube Kids, and I probably also wouldn't let them loose unsupervised on a kids-only internet either, but I would much prefer it to the alternative whack-a-mole approach of trying to make the actual internet a kids friendly place, which will eventually destroy online anonymity and turn a few of the biggest tech companies into de facto gatekeepers for everyone and handing them a regulatory moat the size of the Atlantic.
I'm not against what you're saying, but I also don't mean "like youtube for kids", I mean something we would legislate and build to completely replace the current internet.
I think it's a fools errand to try to keep building walled gardens and hoping to keep the vermin out. What I'm proposing is a literal second internet. No ads, no adult content, no third party tracking, and with training wheels.
We need children to understand what internet scams are, we need them to understand how to use a search engine, and we need them to develop behavioral norms with respect to social media.. we can't do that by just yelling at them to go outside.
So I earnestly want to know how much this would cost.
Actually "completely disconnected"? That would be impossibly expensive.
Easier but still hard would be e.g. a child-mode[0] for consumer[1] operating systems that can only connect to a DNS resolver which itself only resolves certified-by-age-rating content. This would "only" be "extremely expensive": people complain about the cost of getting a film an age rating, and they're only 1-3 hours long and don't get near-continuous updates.
My guess, and it is a guess, is that content for children shouldn't be "the internet", but a small and specifically curated collection for each age range[2], essentially the back catalogue of all the things we've already made for kids, from Saturday morning cartoons to Scholastic books. Of course, this is still flawed, hence my parents' generation fretting over D&D, Harry Potter, and anything about sex education (and twice over if it was gay).
[1] Despite having learned to read with the Commodore 64 user manual, I'd say that if you can get into a command-line OS today with all our easier distractions, then you shouldn't even get asked how old you are.
[2] Even single shows split content in this way, e.g. Sesame Street has different muppets be representative of different developmental stages of kids.
At first I thought this sounded implausible, but then I remembered we already have a second internet, largely isolated from the main internet - the darkweb.
are you really under the impression that preventing exploitation of minors is the goal of these online-identification-masquerading-as-age-verification laws?
no, I realize that's just a way to track people under the guise of protecting children, but I also have a strong desire to see children protected from bad actors. I don't know if this is feasible, but sandboxing doesn't appear to be working very well, so we might as well look into a clean-room approach
> I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet
The bulk of exploitation comes from
1. Big tech. I imagine that 90% of "internet for kids" would be Cocomelon AI-generated slop
2. Other kids bullying each other
Not to mention the simple fact that if you shelter kids from any adult content then they'll turn 18 while still having child-like mindset, which means that "exploitation of kids" will turn into "explanation of young adults".
This is likely because the government fears of protests. Just like the bans in the west were mostly about anti Israel/ pro Palestinian rhetoric, this is a response to the anti Government protests last year in Indonesia and elsewhere. They're afraid of it happening there.
And I personally get a lot of news from Facebook and Insta, never used Twitter. So who is to choose what social media is good and what should be banned.
There was another research in Austria into phone-free living among 46,000 young people shows that three weeks without a smartphone leads to better sleep and less depression. The participants reported increased psychological well-being and a decrease in problematic internet use, even after they started using the phones again. Many young people found new activities such as reading or playing outside to fill the time.
https://science.orf.at/stories/3235664
As a Malaysian and a parent, and as someone who detests censorship and who is wholely aware of the slippery slope nature of censorship, I actually agree with the ban.
This is because in Malaysia we already have seen enough examples of bad, vague laws have been used to shut up/down the ethnic minorities and dissenters, adding this ban will not change too much of the landscape.
Banning younger children to have a social media account is good. If we can ban kids from driving because their brains aren't fully developed yet, why not just ban social media account for the same reason?
It's actually sickening to see that everyone-- especially children-- glues to phone in public space: playground, restaurants and whatnot. Of course you can say that adults should follow the same ban but adults are more resistant to the opium of social media ( refer to the driving car example above). So I think the double standard is excusable.
The detriment effects of social media towards the young, girls especially, are well documented ( see the Jonathan Hahdt book "the anxious generation"). So I think the ban is valid.
Like I've said before i don't necessarily think it's bad that they're raising the minimum age for these sites, but since when does that mean they have to check ids? There's been a minimum age of 13 for decades and that never meant you had to upload your id
That's because the sites put that there to claim they had a rule or whatever. If this new limit is being enforced on them with the intention that it is actually effective, there clearly has to be some way of checking it or kids will just click through - I remember that being parodied in the South Park movie, which must be 25-30 years old now.
Remember, Malaysia is an officially Islamic country, with Islamic laws. This type of law and verification of age / identity will be used to suppress speech and civil liberties. Not to mention the government’s fear of protests that have also rocked their Islamic neighbor, Indonesia.
Keeping children off the internet requires everyone - including adults - be verified and identified online. This is a bad solution to mental health problems. Parents need to control and care for their kids, not take away everyone’s rights because they’re bad parents.
> The rules require social media platforms to implement age-verification systems and block users under 16 from creating accounts.
The to me interesting part is how these all allege to restrict under-age people, but EVERYONE will be forced to give out their year. Aka the world wide web is turned into a giant age-sniffing network. I don't buy for a second that this is due to the alleged "we must protect children". What is also weird is ... if you are 15 years old, you get restricted here; at age 16, you don't, and at age 18 you are often taken from mandatory draft (in some countries) to be used for training in the military. In modern warfare with drones, this means cannon fodder, while the superrich are exempt from everything (look at the orange man and ask him when he served). Something is fundamentally broken here.
I am against these age bans because I know the mechanisms behind it will be used against everybody.
I am, however, all for banning personalised feeds, data collection, targeted ads, what amounts slot machines, and generally the poison these platforms spew.
What this will look like in practice I don't know. I am neither a lawyer, politician, nor do I work on these systems.
>banning personalised feeds
This is just banning social media with one extra step, these apps are virtually useless without personalization and their economy relies on it. I'm all for banning these platforms, we're all hooked on them and we need a hard ban, I know it won't happen but it's the only way.
Personalised is too vague of a term. IMO what destroyed social media was ending the chronological friends feed. When social media stopped being photos from your friends and family and started becoming endless content creator posts and ragebait.
Social media should not show any posts from people you haven’t friended.
You could make social media based on anonymous queries without personalization or likes. It wouldn't be useless, it would just be unrecognizable as social media.
The old social media was at its simplest a chronological feed from the friends, you wanted to see.
If I want to add personalization I could add a algorithm to do that, only so that it promotes my wellbeing.
It really shouldn't be this difficult.
Yeah, tbh I want more personalization in that I want posts from my friends, not clickbait the algorithm has decided I'm interested in because people who engage with this also engage with that...
Instagram (at least in europe) already provides this feature as they have to. Problem is you need to specifically adjust your feed every time you open the app, which makes it kind of useless against the addictive nature of it.
Neutral social backend/API and a local client with the algorithm I've customized.
Or something like that.
Facebook became huge because it was essentially a static feed with a good friend-finding algorithm.
Personally I would prioritize banning things like smoking, alcohol and meat.
But then again, it’s kinda a free world. You can’t just ban everything. I think an age ban is a good middle road.
Banning smoking in public areas is great, though there is (slight) nuance in how bad smoking is depending on ingredients used. Some organic red wine every now and then depending on the individual can be totally fine and possibly beneficial. People binge drinking is terrible for culture.
But banning meat? That is just completely ridiculous. I would 100% agree that factory farming has to stop, as it's damaging to our environment, our animal friends, and ourselves even. But the reality is that (nearly all) humans need meat to thrive. No need to eat it every single day, but definitely a good idea to eat tons of it in general (including fish). This can and should be done in a more sustainable way: regenerative farming.
And just to point it out: vegetable farming is not a holy grail that could even solve this problem. Many would become weak, ill and possibly unfertile.
an age ban for meat would be interesting.. :-) all the rest have them so why not social media which clearly does harm to minors.
> these apps are virtually useless without personalization
Social media was popular before the algorithmically tuned endless scroll.
But not profitable. Not at the levels to justify the share price.
I am completely on the fence regarding these age bans. On one hand you are correct, but on the other hand consider that what’s lost is something most of us probably could live without. I am putting both social media and porn into that bucket.
The more I think about it the less and less difference I see between social media and porn.
Porn is way more regulated and the addiction to it is not a mental health pandemic like social media addiction
Porn addiction huuge too. It's slightly smaller because of it's nature, but it's definitely a pandemic-level health issue.
In our liberatarian paradise where everything is ads and poison because of the ruthless aim of maximizing profit, the biggest enemy is heavy regulation from to some other body that is not a for-profit entity, be it a moral and spiritual guidance of a church or lifestyle or a strong government apparatus that is true to it's aim to improve the lives of it's citizens.
Regulation by powerful for profit companies who spend more on mind control than many countries gdp is ok though right?
Freedom and all that.
Libertarianism is just Anarchism, but only for corporations. (Just like Capitalism is just Socialism for the rich.)
I marketed on FB before ads, our first client at the social agency I worked at in 08 was nature made supplements. It was fun and interesting at the beginning, then ads rolled in and I got out of it. It turned into something like the neighborhood swimming pool where everyone was swimming in each other's... I could see it and feel it.
Since about 2012 or so I was dreaming of a simple law or something on the books that banned ads in algorithmic feeds. It would be a really easy way to stop us from getting where we are today. It certainly would have slowed down the walled gardens and shittification of the internet.
I deal with teenagers that are on this stuff now and it's a fight, constantly. They hate hearing me go on about it.
What do yall think of Snapchat b.c we just caved and let my daughter use it.
The worst part are other parents that don't give a shit. You wouldn't have to fight if everyone would keep their kids off socials.
> I deal with teenagers that are on this stuff now and it's a fight, constantly. They hate hearing me go on about it.
It's an almost daily topic of conversation with my 13 yr old, who doesn't have social media (answering "but why, dad" for the 1000th time). Exhausting.
I live with my older in laws and it’s not just affecting the younger generation. The older generation will also happily doom scroll whatever slop the algorithm feeds them. Usually not uplifting stuff…
Facebook is -literally- old people, screaming at each other.
Younger folks find this horrifying, and no longer use Facebook.
But older folks have more money. It’s just that, traditionally, older folks have been harder to manipulate through advertising, so advertisers generally target younger folks, who are more receptive to the kind of emotional games played by advertisers.
Facebook, however, is a goldmine, because it can affect older folks, like advertisers can affect younger generations.
I feel that the younger generation is much more cynical, and less responsive to media manipulation, than people give them credit for.
As an older person, though, I see my peers being led around like a dog at Westminster. It’s kind of embarrassing, frankly.
All for a maximum age for social media usage too
This is the way! Age verification will expand, to include ban on VPN:s and eventually into total surveillance, and then we'll be slaves of the state, instead of to social media.
I'd much rathar have social media and not be a slave to the state.
I'm against all those things as well but placing a ban on them is the same mechanism as banning anything. People should have the freedom to do things we disagree with. I haven't used social media (other than HN if it counts as one) for almost 20 years. I think they're toxic and a waste of time. But that doesn't mean other people shouldn't be allowed to use them. If people want to watch brainrot all day its they're life and I have no say in that. This is so my own personal freedom is preserved.
You can't have freedom if a few people have a microphone that reaches hundreds of millions of people have zero responsibilities for how they use that microphone.
If you actually haven't used social media recently then I get why you'd be confused, because back in the day Facebook had a chronological timeline of people you specifically added in. The way a modern social media recommender algorithms work is completely different. If you, for example, say "I want to hear everything that Bob has to say" by "subscribing" to Bob or whatever, you "might" see when Bob says something, or instead you "might" see Mary's post from the other side of the world that has some strangely aggressive opinions about someone the billionaire platform owner happens to hate.
Social media companies have decided by buddying up to the US administration that they get to decide what everyone around you sees or hears. If a couple of billionaires decide that they don't like phyzix5761 you might just get lynched by an angry mob. That's not gonna do much for your freedom, in-fact it's kind of the opposite.
A society without rules is not really a society.
It is easy to say that we shouldn't limit what a person is allowed to do. That a person should be allowed to use their free will. That sounds nice because nobody want to be controlled by anyone else. But let's turn it upside down and instead say that we disallow companies from doing certain things.
- Instead of saying that a person may not install unsafe wall sockets, we can say that companies are not allowed to sell unsafe wall sockets. - Instead of saying that a person may not take any job they like, we can say that companies must provide workplace safety. - Instead of saying that people are not allowed to smoke or use social media, we can say that companies are not allowed to sell addictive products.
So it is a question of perspective where both viewpoints are valid.
And of course addictive is a scale from nicotine to deep fried chicken to infinite scroll. And then it is a question about the customer's ability to see through and make rational choices which of course depend on age, knowledge, existing alternatives etc. It is not that easy for a teenager to resist the works of thousands of engineers and data statisticians who are working on increasing retention.
So just saying that it should be allowed because of Free Will is to ignore all the complexities around it.
I wouldn't want my child to access social media but when we say we want to ban all children from accessing these things we're effectively saying we know better than their own parents. Its a sense of superiority that drives these regulatory policies where we believe parents are not knowledgeable or capable enough to make decisions for their own kids.
This is a dangerous mindset and precedent. It means that one day someone else will come along and have the ability to tell us what we can and can't do with our own children. If the next administration thinks it must be mandatory for every child to participate in social media for 4 hours every day now they have the legal and social precedent to impose something like that.
We shouldn't use government to force our own ideas and beliefs on others. Instead, we should set up boundaries that allow each individual to freely choose what they want for themselves and their families as long as it doesn't directly harm the freedoms of others.
Some platforms are good at giving parents control. Apple is pretty good at this when you’re in their eco system.
To get any type of parental control on Minecraft took me the best part of a day, and I’m presumably more tech savvy than average.
Nintendo, Microsoft, Xbox, ea accounts, none of which I use as an adult. It’s a mess, no wonder many parents just don’t bother.
Yes - Australian here. We started this, somehow.
I agree. I’d much rather if we simply banned personalised algorithmic feeds, for everyone. They’re the new smoking. They’re toxic to mental health and to society more broadly. They’re no good for adults or children - so no need for age checks for any of it.
YouTube and Facebook could still work. Just show the channels I’m subscribed to instead of whatever an AI thinks will drive me toward addiction. Even YouTube’s recommended “watch next” could survive. They’d just have to base the recommendations on what the viewer population as a whole enjoy instead of putting me personally in a bubble.
The personalised feeds is the whole point of their reason of being. No personalisation no profits. There just isn't a world where these huge companies can exist without personalised feeds. Meta platforms as well as YT would die and you would have instead something like Nebula which you pay for like Netflix but offers content creators content. Most people wouldn't pay for Nebula and so, you are back to the original point. People would put pressure to restore personalised feeds. Everyone supports these bans until they are the target of them.
This isn't a technological problem but a human one. The fundamental problem is that we haven't developed generalisable, scalable and profitable business models on the internet that aren't toxic.
Not true. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were all successful products before they added personalised algorithmic feeds. Facebook just showed you everything by your friends. Twitter showed your follows (like bsky) and YouTube showed your channels.
The personalised algorithmic junk came later. It was never required for the websites to be wildly popular.
But popular does not mean profitable.
You would go on Facebook for 5 minutes and catch up with your friends. Great.
That’s not much time to shovel adverts. Better to get you engaged with ragebait or cute kittens or whatever keeps you on the site for an hour or 5.
Alright. So? If facebook can’t pull a profit without being a blight on society, they don’t deserve to be in business.
Successful and profitable are not the same thing.
The tech isn’t that expensive or complex. Email didn’t have to add all this junk to be sustainable.
Something like the original Facebook where it’s just posts from your direct friends and no public content would be sustainable. It just wouldn’t make a trillion dollar company.
Well, one example is the "are you a bot check". If you don't give out your age and let the provider verify that, you are banned from using the internet.
Thse are new "freedoms" we are going to enjoy in a little while.
I’m on the fence regarding bans like this.
But from first hand, I grew up on social media and I can’t say it was really positive for me or the people around me that also grew up on/with social media.
I’m wondering how this would change mental health in young people. Can anyone point me to specific studies on this?
Personally I believe that our communities and mental health deteriorate through social media especially in a young age.
Although I am a firm believer of the above, I do not believe that Governments are doing it because they do care about our health. Quite the opposite. I believe they want to manipulate us as much as they can so they can keep in power.
Although they want that, they have seen that social media has the power on gathering people and creating protests, so I believe they want to cut it off on younger people that usually have way more anger and got much less to lose (nowadays that the light at the end of the tunnel is fading) than a middle-aged man being mind-controlled his whole life being a good abiding citizen.
Its a power tool, they are just swinging it where they want. Soonish in EU we'll have the same ban, but it won't be because EU politicians cares about children, it is so they can keep their power and not have a generation that has access to other sources than traditional media and structured schools grooming them on just obeing their masters.
Are political revolutions really brought about by children under 16? I think there's an argument that these policies push for identifying adults and that that might stifle speaking out, but I don't think any of it would be about stifling uprising from 15 year olds.
And when you speak of governments doing this to stay in power: which governments? All political parties in general? Just typical old-school politicians? Because there's a fairly atypical leader in the US, and there's an atypical rising force in Australia, and so on, and I think their popularity is stronger in older age brackets than aforementioned 15 year old.
There was a youth revolution in Napal thanks to social media: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Nepalese_Gen_Z_protests . A revolution in the sense that the protesters violently forced the current government to resign.
> I believe they want to manipulate us as much as they can so they can keep in power.
And the social media companies don't want to manipulate you for power and profit?
The conspiratorial angles to these bans sounds an awful lot like the disinformation you see on social media about subjects like vaccines.
>the disinformation you see on social media about subjects like vaccines.
Governments produced far more disinformation about vaccines than social media, like claiming the covid vaccines reduced transmission when the studies behind them never claimed that and the actual data showed that clearly wasn't the case.
The Anxious Generation is a recent book that extensively explains the damage caused by social media before age 16. The arguments in the book would support such a ban if it manages to get the majority of kids off social media, but it has to be a critical mass and not easily evadable
I'd be very careful about studies that show a result favourable to the current zeitgeist's moral panic:
"A recent study claimed to show that social media use was hurting kids' cognitive development.
But I had access to their data, so I was able to show that they were completely wrong."
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/social-scientists-are-lazy
One issue with this is that it's a non-peer-reviewed critique of a peer-reviewed scientific article. It's of course still possible that the critique is correct and the article is wrong. However, you'd need to deeply understand this critique, and be at least as qualified as the reviewers to be able to convince yourself of that (or have a good reason to believe the reviewers deliberately accepted a flawed paper). Am I missing something?
Its 2026 and you still believe in peer review, I don’t know what to tell you.
Peer review is imperfect, for sure. What alternative method do you recommend?
Difficult topic, too much for a HN comment. Some good starting points: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/brief-notes-on-scientific-critiqu...
Yet like cigarettes or lead you're not prepared to be very careful about results that claim it's all a moral panic being favourable to a very rich elite.
I’ve given this a lot of thought as well and I’m also generally a little unsure, especially because the Internet was so positive for me in most other ways (it’s hard to overstate what battle.net communities did for my psychology and confidence as somebody who felt kind of alone) but I think what ultimately distinguishes the current harm of social media is that what we had back then was not nearly as sophisticated. Yes I’m sure they were getting some data from us, yes there was exploitation and problems, But the current infrastructure of the “attention economy” is absolutely insane and beyond destructive.
From a social perspective, it wasn’t really until Instagram blew up in popularity and we had to start learning not to take people’s feeds as representative of how great their lives were that this stuff started to creep up. IMO Facebook was a little more text driven and myspace was mostly just middle school drama that would’ve taken place IRL anyway.
I get your opinion on networks like battle.net. These also did wonders for me as a person and getting me into IT in the first place, got me connected with people double my age who just taught me valuable lessons on teamwork and growing up.
With my comment I was looking more into the direction of "the social media", where everything seems fake. I luckily grew up, when everything was still based on an actual timeline and not a deeply optimized algorithm.
Yeah I think I kind of accidentally conflated some stuff in that comment. I’m more just broadening out - social media is particularly harmful, but there are parts of the Internet outside of social media that are also not great.
I think that comment about sophistication is absolutely key. Not even just data harvesting, but actively working against the interests of a user to keep them actively engaged.
Yeah it’s just such an overall hostile experience where you have to have your guard up. Which crazy to me is how many people on HN still say that having an ad blocker is selfish/“people just wanting stuff for free.” An ad blocker is basic security at this point.
I would absolutely agree with that about basic security, and that it's been the case for about 20 years.
But you refer here solely to social media.
This is separate from mandating age verification onto everyone.
Personally I don't really care as to whether social media is banned or not, though I also don't think state actors should even be able to restrict us. However had, when it comes to age sniffing, I fail to see why I should yield my personal data, in order to access information on the www. This kind of defeats the purpose of www if a state can restrict us here (any state - not surprising in a dictatorship, but odd in a democracy).
The real subject is what it implies: identification of every Malaysian posting on social media to enforce this ban.
Control of speech through think of the children rhetoric.
This concerted global effort is more about building the surveillance infrastructure for the web that will be required given AI's takeoff, and less-so about the well being of children.
Does take a rather different tone when you consider the FB whistleblower: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48353965
But I think the conversation people aren't having is the reverse of this: when is it time to ban people over, say, 65 from social media? They're often victims of scams and propaganda bot farms.
What do we do about adult radicalization on the Internet?
I'm about as cynical and open to conspiracy as anybody, but I strongly disagree on this one. Social media is a cancer on society as a whole, let alone children who are still trying to figure out who they are. It serves absolutely no positive purpose that couldn't be done at least as well through private chat groups and the like.
I will absolutely be barring my children from social media. I fully expect them to use it or similar sorts of stuff behind my back, but that's okay. It will then be hidden and scarce, which limits the overall negative consequences it can have. Being in a country where this is enforced at a national level is extremely appealing to me.
> I will absolutely be barring my children from [drugs]. I fully expect them to use it or similar sorts of stuff behind my back, but that's okay. It will then be hidden and scarce, which limits the overall negative consequences it can have.
If you make a simple substitution, it becomes clear that "limits the overall negative consequences it can have" in no way logically follows from "behind my back" and "it will then be hidden". Draconian bans are, simply put, extremely lazy parenting, and not only lazy, but ineffectual. All the more so when it's something as relatively innocuous as social media, where your children will be actively shunned by their peers and come to resent you while still finding ways to use it. If you want good outcomes for your children, play an active role in their life and guide them positively instead of thinking you can just say "don't do X" and that will magically be the end of all problems.
In a country where it is banned, there will be no 'normal' social pressure to use it. There might be some fringe pressure to use it, akin to drugs in countries where such is banned, except probably far less. Drugs are at least enjoyable, while basically everybody rates social media as a cancer - especially children, yet they continue to use it through a mixture of addiction and learned dependence.
And no the effects are not "relatively innocuous." It's having a catastrophically negative effect on children, especially girls. Rather than cherry picking one of the zillion studies to support this I'll just link to a search [1], because the evidence is not ambiguous.
[1] - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=effects+of+social+media...
Cigarettes were banned for children and are extremely unenjoyable and yet there was still tremendous social pressure to smoke them (before vaping became cooler). I think that plenty of people clearly enjoy social media, meanwhile. Social media is much like alcohol - not so toxic in responsible dosages, but susceptible to abuse. Even if you don't like social media, it's borderline mandatory to use it in order to form social connections when everyone else is using it. Perhaps that's not a concern for an adult of child-rearing age, who already has their social network established and can snub their nose at social media, but I believe it would be profoundly damaging to a child's social development in this day and age.
Psychology, incidentally, is a completely bunk field of fake science, with somewhere between 2/3rds and 3/4ths of papers being unreplicable. I am highly amenable to applying research and statistics to inform decision-making, but it does you no good if you're using faulty research and statistics. Using the 'authority' of a bad field as a bludgeon to avoid actually making your argument is not compelling. I suggest articulating a case yourself rather than reaching for an article dump as though it proves you objectively correct, unless your goal is simply to reinforce your own biases and assure yourself of the correctness of your decisions, their actual correctness be damned.
Also, I'd note there's kind of two different points of discussion here. One is "banning it for my child even though it's legal" and one is a "national ban". Even if you support the latter and believe it would have a positive outcome, that does not mean it will necessarily have a positive outcome to still ban your children when all of their peers are definitely using it. As far as I see it, a national ban is a complete non-starter for positive outcomes because, regardless of whether it has or doesn't have a positive outcome on a child's social environment, for it to be enforceable requires acceding to a surveillance state in which internet usage is directly tied to your government ID, at which point the negative outcomes for society outweigh any possible positive outcome for children by 100 to 1. You do not want to give government complete and total control of the means of communication, I promise you. Even if you trust your current government to not abuse it, once they have that control it's never becoming undone, so you must also trust that every future government in your and your children's lifetimes will also not abuse the uncontrolled power they've been given -- and if you have that level of unconditional trust in any society, I have a mighty fine bridge to sell you, a real beauty it is.
You're basically saying that you will simply reject all evidence to the contrary of your own personal opinion which is supported by absolutely nothing, contradicted by essentially all evidence that we do have, and is completely out of touch with reality. Cigarette bans were highly effective. Even prior to vaping cigarettes were basically dead. The CDC gives current total tobacco use at 5-10% and it's certainly not the 'cool kids', but moreso the weirdos. [1] They certainly have influence in their own tiny cliques, but that's nothing like "tremendous social pressure."
And as an aside, the whole point of me linking to a search of all studies that the results are not only replicable, but universal. Social media is just horrible for society, especially children, everywhere.
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/php/data-statistics/youth-data-t...
> your own personal opinion which is supported by absolutely nothing,
My personal opinion is supported by life experiences and rational thinking. If all you can do is outsource your thoughts to other people with a 75% miss rate, of which 25% of studies came to the opposite effect when attempted to be replicated, you are simply a tool to be used by propagandists. Let's not forget that psychology is a field that is as likely to find a consistent effect for psychic powers - literal psychic powers - as it is anything else[1]. Those studies are not 'evidence' of anything. The bar is on the floor when it comes to the level of scientific rigor exhibited in the field.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...
Just because you have a reason to agree with something doesn't mean there's no other intention for it.
Actually, the more emotionally invested you are in it, the less likely it is for you to question the motives behind it.
The overwhelming majority of people, independent of political ideology, support banning social media for children. [1] That's just a random poll - you can find a ton, they all say the same thing, and pretty much everywhere across the world. Seeing a conspiracy or ulterior motive with politicians doing something that the overwhelming majority of people want speaks to the state of modern governance and governments, but is nonetheless unjustified.
[1] - https://yougov.com/en-gb/daily-results/20251202-12c49-2
What is it about magically turning 17 that makes social media "safe"?
If these laws were about integrity in social media, there would be disclosure laws for paid time or content creation, disclosure of who pays for ads or time of creators. This would equally protect adults and kids instead of dubious age laws
Nothing. It's a cancer on all of society, but modern societies generally agree that it's desirable to engage in a reasonable standard of protection for children while also allowing adults to engage in vice or undesirable behaviors if they so desire.
Social media now is very different from social media 10 years ago. Back then it was about social interaction with friend, peers, now it's about advertisement, maximizing engagement.
"Algorithms that track user engagement to prioritize what is shown tend to favor content that spurs negative emotions like anger and outrage. Overall, most online misinformation originates from a small minority of “superspreaders,” but social media amplifies their reach and influence."
https://www.apa.org/topics/journalism-facts/how-why-misinfor...
>Social media is a cancer on society as a whole, let alone children who are still trying to figure out who they are. It serves absolutely no positive purpose that couldn't be done at least as well through private chat groups and the like.
Social media provides decentralized information transmission, so people (kids are people) are able to obtain information without it first being filtered through a small cabal of self-interested media corporations and governments. If there was no social media, the Iran war would probably have overwhelming popular support like the Iraq one and there'd already be US boots on the ground.
There isn't US boots on the ground because that would be absolute suicide, have you followed anything that's been going on? It is an asymmetric war they cannot win.
And yes "decentralised" meaning we have personal echo-chambers or a swarm of Elon sycophant accounts with inflated number of views and bots mass liking each extremist post. LLMs are going to put astroturfing campaigns on steroids.
The way how corporations like Meta implemented modern social medias filter information as well. It does it in a different way than TV, but personalized information bubbles are important arguments again using "social" medias.
Except all major social media sites are also corporations with their own interests. I'd rather the business model of traditional media that rides on journalistic reputation to a recommendation feed where the only job of it is to keep you on the site, especially when said feed can easily be manipulated.
No media organisation is perfect but your description of social media as some nirvana of decentralised truth is very questionable.
On the other hand, without social media, there might not be a Trump government in the first place.
In many countries, targeted ads aren’t allowed for kids. By forcing age verification, companies in the targeted ads business (like Meta) can shift liability away from themselves and rely on forced identity verification done by someone else. It means they get to advertise a whole lot more, since they can blindly trust the verification instead of having to be on the side of caution and advertise less.
This is why they have lobbied many states in America for age verification laws, and are the alleged main funding source for the campaigns trying to make this about child safety when it’s about their profits. And the governments support it because it means they can identify people online and suppress speech. It’s literally the fascist notion of merging corporate power and authoritarian government power.
I mean none of the big social networks have any privacy anyways, they can exactly pinpoint who you are. I'm ok with this additional verification since no privacy is being lost really. No real politically endangered group is going to communicate via these networks anyways.
But this further ensures that that cannot be changed in the future.
I think we lost this fight about 2-3 decades ago, when we sacrificed privacy for free stuff, mainly because the environment wasn’t this hostile yet. However, these additional steps in the wrong direction doesn’t help at all, but I also think that nobody will get any new information with these nowadays.
It's a privilege for these tech companies to operate in these nations, not a right.
If they can't demonstrate positive value, then countries are absolutely right to cut out a cancer.
I'm hugely in favour of more regulation with more revenue/users. If my income tax scales, so should the penalties associated their wealth extraction models. Ideally these big tech firms should be eliminating all the negative externalities associated with their use, either through funding systems, or a direct tax on revenue.
The privacy side is worrying, but does Meta, Google, etc products are the antithesis of privacy anyway. Anything which burns their model and ideologies to the ground is a welcome change. As long as these draconian regulations only impact the hugest companies who don't demonstrate positive value, I think it's ok. If they start coming for smaller sites, message boards, etc, then it's a problem.
Ah, it requires at least 8 million users[0] in Malaysia and they have a list. I was wondering how Hacker News etc. were going to comply.
0: https://soyacincau.com/2025/12/15/mcmc-social-media-instant-...
The list is pretty small, so I wonder if this just drives users to other, smaller platforms. That said, the list of platforms includes all the biggest offenders of engagement optimization, so it feels more like a ban of addictive social media than all social media in general. But it's also interesting they ban messaging apps, which I assume parents use to keep contact with their kids.
So we're all going to accept mass survaliance for everybody who is >=16 in order to "protect" those who are under 16. Yet parents wont get any notices if their child bypasses the id check.
Social media is inherently mass surveillance, or at least that's the narrative the big companies themselves sell to those who want ad slots in order to justify the prices they charge.
HN is social media...
I think the term 'social media' has outlived its purpose. It's too vague to be used in discussion. 'Social' seems a bit redundant, as isn't most media inherently social?
It's quite a nice, flattering term for these companies. They get to advertise their platforms as being 'social' (bringing people closer together, having firneds), and 'media' (wow look at all these fun, cool pics and videos!), when in reality, it's kinda the opposite.
I think we need to start naming things based on who actually owns these companies, the essence of their operations, and where they generate the most of their revenues from. Ad Platforms? Surveillance Boards?
We built this city
Creating accounts should be allowed, but using an account could require age check.
People should be able to create an account at birth. Then when they grow up, they are ready to use the account. This way proves that the account owner is at least as old as the account.
Great news, hope many more countries follow suit.
Like banning the sale of nicotine products to under-16s, it won't be a perfect solution as a few will continue to work around the restriction, but it's a huge step in the right direction.
I like this. I'm just worried that it's going to make it way harder to create new independent small websites, if the webmasters have to check their users' age.
Well no-one said they have to implement it themselves. I'm sure Google and Apple are willing to send a hardware-signed attestation that the device owner is 18+ if required bu the state.
I think this is by design. I think small independent new websites will cease to exist.
I'm generally supportive of bans like this, but I don't want it to come at the expense of the privacy of adult users. I fear this is the way we're going in the west.
"The rules ... apply to platforms with at least 8 million users..."
...for now.
There is nothing social about social media as it exists today. The social component was meant to be socialising with friends and like-minded individuals. As it exists it is at best parasocial media. Realistically its simply a funnel for content from creators, and the ads that leech onto said content.
> The social component was meant to be socialising with friends and like-minded individuals.
That still exists. I know people who mostly use just that part and don't like to doomscroll. I also personally connected to new people through socials and these friendships are pretty strong.
Social media today is just designed to induce a zombie state where you sit for hours scrolling short form video and adverts. If it was destroyed entirely society would be better off.
I've got four children ranging from 11 to 33. All of them digital native, all of them had no restrictions whatsoever on gadgets and online at all. All grew up to become good and successful people.
I will do everything in my power to keep my youngest connected to all the social networks he wants and I will not take those legal requirements into consideration.
Out of curiosity, how difficult (from reasonably expensive to impossibly expensive) would it be to build a second internet for children, completely disconnected from what we'd call the adult internet?
If we're going toward this highly curated model, which I'm not against, I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet.
It might be a good business (like youtube for kids) but would it actually be good for kids? They should go outside with their friends, and people in the tech industry should stay away from them. Allegedly good intentions ("help you stay in touch with your friends") will eventually turn into what it always turns into.
Nothing is universally good for kids in too big quantities, but I think this approach would be less bad than any other approach to the moral panic around social media.
I would never let my kids access YouTube Kids, and I probably also wouldn't let them loose unsupervised on a kids-only internet either, but I would much prefer it to the alternative whack-a-mole approach of trying to make the actual internet a kids friendly place, which will eventually destroy online anonymity and turn a few of the biggest tech companies into de facto gatekeepers for everyone and handing them a regulatory moat the size of the Atlantic.
I'm not against what you're saying, but I also don't mean "like youtube for kids", I mean something we would legislate and build to completely replace the current internet.
I think it's a fools errand to try to keep building walled gardens and hoping to keep the vermin out. What I'm proposing is a literal second internet. No ads, no adult content, no third party tracking, and with training wheels.
We need children to understand what internet scams are, we need them to understand how to use a search engine, and we need them to develop behavioral norms with respect to social media.. we can't do that by just yelling at them to go outside.
So I earnestly want to know how much this would cost.
Actually "completely disconnected"? That would be impossibly expensive.
Easier but still hard would be e.g. a child-mode[0] for consumer[1] operating systems that can only connect to a DNS resolver which itself only resolves certified-by-age-rating content. This would "only" be "extremely expensive": people complain about the cost of getting a film an age rating, and they're only 1-3 hours long and don't get near-continuous updates.
My guess, and it is a guess, is that content for children shouldn't be "the internet", but a small and specifically curated collection for each age range[2], essentially the back catalogue of all the things we've already made for kids, from Saturday morning cartoons to Scholastic books. Of course, this is still flawed, hence my parents' generation fretting over D&D, Harry Potter, and anything about sex education (and twice over if it was gay).
[0] or a multitude, corresponding to film content rating systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_content_rating_...
[1] Despite having learned to read with the Commodore 64 user manual, I'd say that if you can get into a command-line OS today with all our easier distractions, then you shouldn't even get asked how old you are.
[2] Even single shows split content in this way, e.g. Sesame Street has different muppets be representative of different developmental stages of kids.
I shudder at the mere thought of opening this can of worms, but… have you looked into web3?
Web3 is neckbeard territory, under 16s rarely get that kind of hair.
At first I thought this sounded implausible, but then I remembered we already have a second internet, largely isolated from the main internet - the darkweb.
This is what AOL/Compuserve were in the very old dialup days. Curated spaces.
Prepare for Lords of the Flies: Digital Edition , I'd say.
are you really under the impression that preventing exploitation of minors is the goal of these online-identification-masquerading-as-age-verification laws?
no, I realize that's just a way to track people under the guise of protecting children, but I also have a strong desire to see children protected from bad actors. I don't know if this is feasible, but sandboxing doesn't appear to be working very well, so we might as well look into a clean-room approach
> I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet
The bulk of exploitation comes from
1. Big tech. I imagine that 90% of "internet for kids" would be Cocomelon AI-generated slop
2. Other kids bullying each other
Not to mention the simple fact that if you shelter kids from any adult content then they'll turn 18 while still having child-like mindset, which means that "exploitation of kids" will turn into "explanation of young adults".
This is likely because the government fears of protests. Just like the bans in the west were mostly about anti Israel/ pro Palestinian rhetoric, this is a response to the anti Government protests last year in Indonesia and elsewhere. They're afraid of it happening there.
Why is this removed from the front page. 2 hours after posting, 117 up votes and more than 10 healthy comment threads?
At this point, if we all get banned from Instagram and Facebook we lose nothing. I find Twitter very useful still for software stuff.
And I personally get a lot of news from Facebook and Insta, never used Twitter. So who is to choose what social media is good and what should be banned.
omg, Twitter is as useless as Instagram is.
There was another research in Austria into phone-free living among 46,000 young people shows that three weeks without a smartphone leads to better sleep and less depression. The participants reported increased psychological well-being and a decrease in problematic internet use, even after they started using the phones again. Many young people found new activities such as reading or playing outside to fill the time. https://science.orf.at/stories/3235664
As a Malaysian and a parent, and as someone who detests censorship and who is wholely aware of the slippery slope nature of censorship, I actually agree with the ban.
This is because in Malaysia we already have seen enough examples of bad, vague laws have been used to shut up/down the ethnic minorities and dissenters, adding this ban will not change too much of the landscape.
Banning younger children to have a social media account is good. If we can ban kids from driving because their brains aren't fully developed yet, why not just ban social media account for the same reason?
It's actually sickening to see that everyone-- especially children-- glues to phone in public space: playground, restaurants and whatnot. Of course you can say that adults should follow the same ban but adults are more resistant to the opium of social media ( refer to the driving car example above). So I think the double standard is excusable.
The detriment effects of social media towards the young, girls especially, are well documented ( see the Jonathan Hahdt book "the anxious generation"). So I think the ban is valid.
Like I've said before i don't necessarily think it's bad that they're raising the minimum age for these sites, but since when does that mean they have to check ids? There's been a minimum age of 13 for decades and that never meant you had to upload your id
That's because the sites put that there to claim they had a rule or whatever. If this new limit is being enforced on them with the intention that it is actually effective, there clearly has to be some way of checking it or kids will just click through - I remember that being parodied in the South Park movie, which must be 25-30 years old now.
Honestly? Yes
Social media is more harmful than alcohol, and it could solicit so much negative reactions at formation age. This needs to be global.
Remember, Malaysia is an officially Islamic country, with Islamic laws. This type of law and verification of age / identity will be used to suppress speech and civil liberties. Not to mention the government’s fear of protests that have also rocked their Islamic neighbor, Indonesia.
Keeping children off the internet requires everyone - including adults - be verified and identified online. This is a bad solution to mental health problems. Parents need to control and care for their kids, not take away everyone’s rights because they’re bad parents.
> The rules require social media platforms to implement age-verification systems and block users under 16 from creating accounts.
The to me interesting part is how these all allege to restrict under-age people, but EVERYONE will be forced to give out their year. Aka the world wide web is turned into a giant age-sniffing network. I don't buy for a second that this is due to the alleged "we must protect children". What is also weird is ... if you are 15 years old, you get restricted here; at age 16, you don't, and at age 18 you are often taken from mandatory draft (in some countries) to be used for training in the military. In modern warfare with drones, this means cannon fodder, while the superrich are exempt from everything (look at the orange man and ask him when he served). Something is fundamentally broken here.