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> These bills will likely face considerable constitutional challenges. Previous attempts to block minors from accessing Web sites via broad legislation, includi

> These bills will likely face considerable constitutional challenges. Previous attempts to block minors from accessing Web sites via broad legislation, including the Child Online Protection Act, from 1998, have been struck down on First Amendment grounds. You might get farther instead of banning children from social media, ban all ads to children on social media. Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,000 fine. If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
asddubs 4y ago
have fun uploading a copy of your passport every time you visit a new domain then.
- Xeoncross 4y ago
  Which will be very expensive for startups as well and ensure those with market dominance stay that way no matter how bad they get. This isn't sounding good.
  - C50VGicCxmHC 4y ago
    Only startups that are based on advertising.
    - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
      Or any startup that allows user-posted content, which could be an ad. Hacker News would be gone. Or at least not allow open submissions and comments because they’d all have to be individually checked to confirm they aren’t ads.
- jackmott 4y ago
  [dead]
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  I already plug my own birthday into all my kids accounts when I create them. A lot of sites wont even let you create an account for somebody less than 13
  - asddubs 4y ago
    because of COPPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
ke88y 4y ago
> If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site. Nah. The marginal cost of a cigarette is tiny compared to the lifetime revenue of an addict. The marginal cost of a some GBs is even lower than that of a cigarette, and the lifetime revenue of a social media addict is enormous.
- boplicity 4y ago
  I wonder what the lifetime value of the "average" HN participant is, if HN leads to YC backing just one company per year that eventually become a unicorn.
debacle 4y ago
The majority of Instagram posts are ads, whether actual advertisements or not. This would be almost impossible to enforce.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Actually, it would be quite simple. - Record a social media site advertising to a user who is under XX years old. Complain to a portal. - Fine $1000 x complaint received each month. - Continue to do so until the service's accounts satisfy some sort of auditing standard. Come on, we do this for all kinds of things like credit card information and other data certifications.
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > Fine $1000 x complaint received each month. Ahh yes, fine companies $1000 for each complaint received. Surely nothing will go wrong and nobody would ever think to do this to sink their competitors? Surely the government overhead of enforcing this would be cheap? It’s so weird to read all of these HN comments that can’t take basic realities of the internet and regulation into account. Suggesting automatic $1000 fines to companies for “complaints received” is the most obviously exploitable system, which is bizarre to see on a site that usually brainstorms ways something can be exploited. Websites like Hacker News would disappear because they can’t risk $1000 every time someone complains or if someone posts something that might be an ad. Reddit gone, forums gone, Discord gone. The internet would become a walled garden of pre-approved corporate content, viewable only after you verify your ID and add a credit card to confirm that you're an adult.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Or you prepare before launch to a provided set of standards. PCI hasn't sunk innovation, for example.
  - YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
    You're targeting this at the wrong end. Fine the advertisers for buying the ad space, not the platforms for showing it. Make disclosure of recipients of advertising expenditure mandatory for tax purposes. Hiding advertising expenditure? Fraud. Failure to disclose? Well, you don't get tax write-offs on undisclosed expenses, so nobody would do that.
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
Hrm. I'm not a big fan of this proposal, but I think that implementation would be technically interesting. Say we create a "this is a child" header, which would be sent with all HTTP requests and would mandate that the user not be tracked or advertised to. Great solution, except that everybody would immediately switch the header on because everybody hates ads. In effect, everybody wants to be a child. So now online services fight back and say "okay, well, TikTok is only for adults anyway, you must be 18 to use it, so if this header is present, you can't use TikTok." So adults turn the header back off, and kids go back to lying about being 18. Except for this to have teeth, we have to say that "a user's promise that they are an adult is insufficient to avoid the fine." So now we waltz into the realm of porn sites in the 1990s or Truth Social today: enter a valid credit card number to prove that you are an adult, or maybe take a photo of yourself holding your driver's license and submit it to TikTok for approval. Ick. Okay, so let's go further. Let's say that there's a Government Identity office that, when you turn 18, grants you an Adult Citizen ID# security key that lets you verify your identity digitally. That has the upside of solving a bunch of identity problems. You could imagine using it for voting, banking, signing contracts digitally, proving eligibility to work and citizenship. But also lets you verify to websites that you're an adult. Downside: easier than ever for governments and everybody else to reliably track you and cross-reference you between databases. Less great. But also, I'm not going to choose to "prove I'm an adult" to most of the Internet, just the sites I want to use. Proving I'm an adult is the same as telling them exactly who I am. Ain't no way I want to do that. Ads on random websites are dead. Google's dead overnight unless they require that I log in just to use it (which presumably they would, and I don't care for that at all). Now using the Internet in incognito mode becomes practically impossible. YouTube has a lot of product placement. Is Mark Rober going to get fined if I show my kids his videos? On the other hand, Ryan and Blippi become illegal. Actually, I'm suddenly 100% on board with this.
- andreareina 4y ago
  The key can attest "the identity associated with this key is over 18" without leaking the identity
  - inkblotuniverse 4y ago
amatecha 4y ago
Eh, honestly, just go all the way and ban advertising altogether (I would be so happy if this happened, even though it obviously never will). Pretty willing to tank my karma to say this, I don't care, I think advertising is one of the biggest psychological pollutants in modern society and any possible benefit (??) is vastly outweighed by the cognitive waste incurred by all who are subjected to it.
- TheBozzCL 4y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree with you here. It’s sad that I haven’t found a way to explain this view to others without sounding like a raving lunatic - which also speaks volumes about the state of the tracking/advertising industry. Pihole via DoH plus uBlock has changed the internet so much for me, I literally can’t stand using other people’s devices. Let’s not even talk about watching TV, going to a sports bar is downright shocking.
  - staunton 4y ago
    My impression (after suggesting it elsewhere) is that a lot of HN generally agrees with banning adds.
    - jen20 4y ago
      (Except the ones who work for advertising brokers masquerading as technology companies of course)
- hunter-gatherer 4y ago
  I ran a similar thought experiment with a collegue the other day. We talked about how the world might change if internet ads were made illegal overnight. A lot of tech companies would lose value and I suspect a significant portion of the economy would become less productive, but I don't think it wouod be catastrophic for society. In fact, I think we'd maybe all slow down, not purchase as much andaybe even desire less. As you said, it will never happen, but I too would be pleased if it did.
kelipso 4y ago
A start would be ban ads that target children, base the rules off the banning of cigarette ads targeted at children. Much easier to implement, I would think.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  While I'd like this, the YouTube 'made for kids' debacle shows that neither legislators nor platform owners can be trusted to implement this in a sane fashion.
hackerlight 4y ago
> If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site. Absolutely not. Where do you think 18 year old users will come from? They will come from 17 year old users who turn 18. Therefore, social media sites will still have an incentive to corral kids onto the platform. Because they will one day turn 18 (or 16, or whatever the legislated age cutoff is) and become a source of revenue. Moreover, social media sites want network effects and want to be trendy among young people, even if these things don't directly lead to revenue.
ehnto 4y ago
From my experience it took very active moderation to even poorly enforce COPA style rules and that was with a small user base, not the mega-userbases of today's social media. Kids just sign up anyway and then the moderators wait for them to slip up and still are just making an educated guess. The only way to make it more effective I feel is ID verification but then you are looking at collecting IDs from kids and that is a total non-starter in my opinion, not to mention they don't usually have a verifiable ID yet. I don't have the solution, but if we look at other age prohibited activities they are usually restricted up until the age that you are considered an adult and as such ID is more reasonable to ask for.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > Kids just sign up anyway and then the moderators wait for them to slip up and still are just making an educated guess. I’m baffled by all of these HN posts from people who seemingly forgot what being a kid is like. Kids are experts at circumventing the rules. All of these suggestions about fining companies any time a kid manages to use the website are DOA. Kids will use the internet and steal their parents accounts, IDs, and credit cards. The harder you lock it down, the more terrible the internet is going to become for anyone trying to use it. Meanwhile, every social website will just pick up and relocate to a country with sane laws overnight.
  - johnny22 4y ago
    i mean really.. the site is called "Hacker News" and breaking established rules and restrictions is kind of the point.
- baq 4y ago
  The government or a bank or some other private or public trustworthy institution could be a limited identity provider which could authenticate that this guy is not really a kid. The trustworthy part is going to be difficult though. It works in Europe for adults, but US folks seem to be allergic to the idea.
  - 4y ago
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Always baffling to see suggestions like this on HN: > Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,000 fine. > If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site. Do you really want to live in a world where every website forces you to log in and verify your state-issued ID? I think some people see the words “social media” and assume it only applies to sites they don’t use, so they don’t care how unreasonable the demands are. Yet everything from HN to Reddit to YouTube is a social media platform. Do you really want to go through the process of ID verification for every single site you sign up for? Put everything behind a paywall so the website can confirm you’re an adult? It’s weird to see how quickly HN likes to jump to extreme government regulation of online spaces these days.
- Beaver117 4y ago
  I'm so tired of this argument. HN and Reddit are not social media. Is your real name Pragmatic Pulp? Do you post pictures/videos of yourself here, or update us about your family? I could go on but I hope you get it. "Social Media" is a really specific term and it doesnt mean any random forum.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >Is your real name Pragmatic Pulp? Do you post pictures/videos of yourself here, or update us about your family? I could go on but I hope you get it. At least on wikipedia, the definition for "social media" doesn't include real names, or posting stuff about your life specifically. >Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.[1][2] While challenges to the definition of social media arise[3][4] due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features:[2] >1. Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.[2][5] >2. User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the lifeblood of social media.[2][5] >3. Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.[2][6] >4. Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.[2][6]
DubiousPusher 4y ago
Demonetize children has the making of a pretty good slogan.
- baq 4y ago
  There are billions of dollars waiting to shred any lawmaker to pieces for uttering this phrase off record and tens of billions when on record. Good phrase though.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
No they won't. They'll keep the kids on as a loss leader. So much value add in indirect ways. Put up with a few years of not advertising to them so you have a user base later on. Keep the parents on-site under the delusion they are "spying" on their kid.
threatofrain 4y ago
One way they might do so is to require government ID, like other countries do. If we want accountability then perhaps every account should be tied to a government ID.
jasmer 4y ago
I don't think that banning ads would make much difference. TikTok doesn't even have that many ads. And weirdly - TikTok ads are generally decent - they are short, to the point, kind of authentic, not creepy. It's actually something they've done well.
throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
That's about as likely to happen as banning sugary cereal
skizm 4y ago
The problem is that ads and content are blurred today. I'd say something approaching 50% of "content" is actually some sort of advertisement. It would be pretty much impossible to root advertisements out of user generated content. At least ads placed by the website are clearly labeled (well they're supposed to be by law at least).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

asddubs 4y ago

have fun uploading a copy of your passport every time you visit a new domain then.

Xeoncross 4y ago
Which will be very expensive for startups as well and ensure those with market dominance stay that way no matter how bad they get. This isn't sounding good.
- C50VGicCxmHC 4y ago
  Only startups that are based on advertising.
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    Or any startup that allows user-posted content, which could be an ad. Hacker News would be gone. Or at least not allow open submissions and comments because they’d all have to be individually checked to confirm they aren’t ads.
jackmott 4y ago
[dead]
jay_kyburz 4y ago
I already plug my own birthday into all my kids accounts when I create them. A lot of sites wont even let you create an account for somebody less than 13
- asddubs 4y ago
  because of COPPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...

ke88y 4y ago

> If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site. Nah. The marginal cost of a cigarette is tiny compared to the lifetime revenue of an addict. The marginal cost of a some GBs is even lower than that of a cigarette, and the lifetime revenue of a social media addict is enormous.

boplicity 4y ago
I wonder what the lifetime value of the "average" HN participant is, if HN leads to YC backing just one company per year that eventually become a unicorn.

debacle 4y ago

The majority of Instagram posts are ads, whether actual advertisements or not. This would be almost impossible to enforce.

tomrod 4y ago
Actually, it would be quite simple. - Record a social media site advertising to a user who is under XX years old. Complain to a portal. - Fine $1000 x complaint received each month. - Continue to do so until the service's accounts satisfy some sort of auditing standard. Come on, we do this for all kinds of things like credit card information and other data certifications.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > Fine $1000 x complaint received each month. Ahh yes, fine companies $1000 for each complaint received. Surely nothing will go wrong and nobody would ever think to do this to sink their competitors? Surely the government overhead of enforcing this would be cheap? It’s so weird to read all of these HN comments that can’t take basic realities of the internet and regulation into account. Suggesting automatic $1000 fines to companies for “complaints received” is the most obviously exploitable system, which is bizarre to see on a site that usually brainstorms ways something can be exploited. Websites like Hacker News would disappear because they can’t risk $1000 every time someone complains or if someone posts something that might be an ad. Reddit gone, forums gone, Discord gone. The internet would become a walled garden of pre-approved corporate content, viewable only after you verify your ID and add a credit card to confirm that you're an adult.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Or you prepare before launch to a provided set of standards. PCI hasn't sunk innovation, for example.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  You're targeting this at the wrong end. Fine the advertisers for buying the ad space, not the platforms for showing it. Make disclosure of recipients of advertising expenditure mandatory for tax purposes. Hiding advertising expenditure? Fraud. Failure to disclose? Well, you don't get tax write-offs on undisclosed expenses, so nobody would do that.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago

Hrm. I'm not a big fan of this proposal, but I think that implementation would be technically interesting. Say we create a "this is a child" header, which would be sent with all HTTP requests and would mandate that the user not be tracked or advertised to. Great solution, except that everybody would immediately switch the header on because everybody hates ads. In effect, everybody wants to be a child. So now online services fight back and say "okay, well, TikTok is only for adults anyway, you must be 18 to use it, so if this header is present, you can't use TikTok." So adults turn the header back off, and kids go back to lying about being 18. Except for this to have teeth, we have to say that "a user's promise that they are an adult is insufficient to avoid the fine." So now we waltz into the realm of porn sites in the 1990s or Truth Social today: enter a valid credit card number to prove that you are an adult, or maybe take a photo of yourself holding your driver's license and submit it to TikTok for approval. Ick. Okay, so let's go further. Let's say that there's a Government Identity office that, when you turn 18, grants you an Adult Citizen ID# security key that lets you verify your identity digitally. That has the upside of solving a bunch of identity problems. You could imagine using it for voting, banking, signing contracts digitally, proving eligibility to work and citizenship. But also lets you verify to websites that you're an adult. Downside: easier than ever for governments and everybody else to reliably track you and cross-reference you between databases. Less great. But also, I'm not going to choose to "prove I'm an adult" to most of the Internet, just the sites I want to use. Proving I'm an adult is the same as telling them exactly who I am. Ain't no way I want to do that. Ads on random websites are dead. Google's dead overnight unless they require that I log in just to use it (which presumably they would, and I don't care for that at all). Now using the Internet in incognito mode becomes practically impossible. YouTube has a lot of product placement. Is Mark Rober going to get fined if I show my kids his videos? On the other hand, Ryan and Blippi become illegal. Actually, I'm suddenly 100% on board with this.

andreareina 4y ago
The key can attest "the identity associated with this key is over 18" without leaking the identity
- inkblotuniverse 4y ago

amatecha 4y ago

Eh, honestly, just go all the way and ban advertising altogether (I would be so happy if this happened, even though it obviously never will). Pretty willing to tank my karma to say this, I don't care, I think advertising is one of the biggest psychological pollutants in modern society and any possible benefit (??) is vastly outweighed by the cognitive waste incurred by all who are subjected to it.

TheBozzCL 4y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with you here. It’s sad that I haven’t found a way to explain this view to others without sounding like a raving lunatic - which also speaks volumes about the state of the tracking/advertising industry. Pihole via DoH plus uBlock has changed the internet so much for me, I literally can’t stand using other people’s devices. Let’s not even talk about watching TV, going to a sports bar is downright shocking.
- staunton 4y ago
  My impression (after suggesting it elsewhere) is that a lot of HN generally agrees with banning adds.
  - jen20 4y ago
    (Except the ones who work for advertising brokers masquerading as technology companies of course)
hunter-gatherer 4y ago
I ran a similar thought experiment with a collegue the other day. We talked about how the world might change if internet ads were made illegal overnight. A lot of tech companies would lose value and I suspect a significant portion of the economy would become less productive, but I don't think it wouod be catastrophic for society. In fact, I think we'd maybe all slow down, not purchase as much andaybe even desire less. As you said, it will never happen, but I too would be pleased if it did.

kelipso 4y ago

A start would be ban ads that target children, base the rules off the banning of cigarette ads targeted at children. Much easier to implement, I would think.

YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
While I'd like this, the YouTube 'made for kids' debacle shows that neither legislators nor platform owners can be trusted to implement this in a sane fashion.

hackerlight 4y ago

> If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site. Absolutely not. Where do you think 18 year old users will come from? They will come from 17 year old users who turn 18. Therefore, social media sites will still have an incentive to corral kids onto the platform. Because they will one day turn 18 (or 16, or whatever the legislated age cutoff is) and become a source of revenue. Moreover, social media sites want network effects and want to be trendy among young people, even if these things don't directly lead to revenue.

ehnto 4y ago

From my experience it took very active moderation to even poorly enforce COPA style rules and that was with a small user base, not the mega-userbases of today's social media. Kids just sign up anyway and then the moderators wait for them to slip up and still are just making an educated guess. The only way to make it more effective I feel is ID verification but then you are looking at collecting IDs from kids and that is a total non-starter in my opinion, not to mention they don't usually have a verifiable ID yet. I don't have the solution, but if we look at other age prohibited activities they are usually restricted up until the age that you are considered an adult and as such ID is more reasonable to ask for.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Kids just sign up anyway and then the moderators wait for them to slip up and still are just making an educated guess. I’m baffled by all of these HN posts from people who seemingly forgot what being a kid is like. Kids are experts at circumventing the rules. All of these suggestions about fining companies any time a kid manages to use the website are DOA. Kids will use the internet and steal their parents accounts, IDs, and credit cards. The harder you lock it down, the more terrible the internet is going to become for anyone trying to use it. Meanwhile, every social website will just pick up and relocate to a country with sane laws overnight.
- johnny22 4y ago
  i mean really.. the site is called "Hacker News" and breaking established rules and restrictions is kind of the point.
baq 4y ago
The government or a bank or some other private or public trustworthy institution could be a limited identity provider which could authenticate that this guy is not really a kid. The trustworthy part is going to be difficult though. It works in Europe for adults, but US folks seem to be allergic to the idea.
- 4y ago

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

Always baffling to see suggestions like this on HN: > Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,000 fine. > If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site. Do you really want to live in a world where every website forces you to log in and verify your state-issued ID? I think some people see the words “social media” and assume it only applies to sites they don’t use, so they don’t care how unreasonable the demands are. Yet everything from HN to Reddit to YouTube is a social media platform. Do you really want to go through the process of ID verification for every single site you sign up for? Put everything behind a paywall so the website can confirm you’re an adult? It’s weird to see how quickly HN likes to jump to extreme government regulation of online spaces these days.

Beaver117 4y ago
I'm so tired of this argument. HN and Reddit are not social media. Is your real name Pragmatic Pulp? Do you post pictures/videos of yourself here, or update us about your family? I could go on but I hope you get it. "Social Media" is a really specific term and it doesnt mean any random forum.
- gruez 4y ago
  >Is your real name Pragmatic Pulp? Do you post pictures/videos of yourself here, or update us about your family? I could go on but I hope you get it. At least on wikipedia, the definition for "social media" doesn't include real names, or posting stuff about your life specifically. >Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.[1][2] While challenges to the definition of social media arise[3][4] due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features:[2] >1. Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.[2][5] >2. User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the lifeblood of social media.[2][5] >3. Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.[2][6] >4. Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.[2][6]

DubiousPusher 4y ago

Demonetize children has the making of a pretty good slogan.

baq 4y ago
There are billions of dollars waiting to shred any lawmaker to pieces for uttering this phrase off record and tens of billions when on record. Good phrase though.

IIAOPSW 4y ago

No they won't. They'll keep the kids on as a loss leader. So much value add in indirect ways. Put up with a few years of not advertising to them so you have a user base later on. Keep the parents on-site under the delusion they are "spying" on their kid.

threatofrain 4y ago

One way they might do so is to require government ID, like other countries do. If we want accountability then perhaps every account should be tied to a government ID.

jasmer 4y ago

I don't think that banning ads would make much difference. TikTok doesn't even have that many ads. And weirdly - TikTok ads are generally decent - they are short, to the point, kind of authentic, not creepy. It's actually something they've done well.

throwawaaarrgh 4y ago

That's about as likely to happen as banning sugary cereal

skizm 4y ago

The problem is that ads and content are blurred today. I'd say something approaching 50% of "content" is actually some sort of advertisement. It would be pretty much impossible to root advertisements out of user generated content. At least ads placed by the website are clearly labeled (well they're supposed to be by law at least).